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RECOLLECTIONS 



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Recollections 



BY 

WILLIAM O'BRIEN, M.P. 



Neto gork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
I9OS 

All rights reserved 



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LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 28 1905 

Cooyrieht Entry 
CUSS <a XXc. No. 

/ 3 Z X 3 3 

COPY D. 



Copyright, 1905, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1905. 



J. S. Cashing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



TO 

THE MOTHER OF MY WIFE 

WITH 
AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 



PACE 

My Father and Mother i 



CHAPTER H 
My First Recollections 14 

CHAPTER HI 
Daydreams 27 

CHAPTER IV 
The Fenian Cycle (i 865-1 867) 48 

CHAPTER V 
The Cork Press (i 868-1 874) 69 

CHAPTER VI 

My First Word and Last on Irish Affairs (1870- 

1874) 89 

CHAPTER VII 

Physical Force and Moral Force (i 870-1 874) . . nS 

vii 



viii WILLIAM O'BRIEN 



CHAPTER VIII 

PAGE 

Sickness, Political and Physical (i 870-1 875) . .152 



CHAPTER IX 

The 'Freeman's Journal' (i 876-1 880) . . .179 

CHAPTER X 
Death and a Resurrection (i 878-1 880) . . . 203 

CHAPTER XI 
The General Election of 1880 231 

CHAPTER XII 

The Rock of Cashel and its Archbishop- King 

(1880) 267 

CHAPTER XIII 
'United Ireland' (1881) 291 

CHAPTER XIV 
Kilmainham (October 1881) 319 

CHAPTER XV 

The No- Rent Manifesto (October 18th, 1881 — May 

2nd, 1882) 363 



CONTENTS ix 



CHAPTER XVI 

PAGE 

A Newspaper's Fight for Life (i 881-1882) . . 378 



CHAPTER XVII 

The KiLMAiNHAM Treaty — and After (1882) . . 417 

CHAPTER XVIII 
The Deepest Depth (1882) 439 

CHAPTER XIX 
The National League (1882) 465 

CHAPTER XX 
The Mallow Election (i 882-1 883) .... 479 

INDEX 5" 

PLATES 

Charles Stewart Parnell . 

Isaac Butt 

Archbishop Croke .... 

William O'Brien 

The Blackwater at Rockforest 



Frontispiece 


To face page 


115 r 


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267 -^ 


»i » 


378- 


>» )) 


479 / 



CHAPTER 1 



MY FATHER AND MOTHER 



I WAS born in Mallow on October 2nd, 1852. I 
first ascertained the fact from an entry on the fly- 
leaf of Connellan's edition of the Four Masters, on 
which the dates of my parents' marriage and of the 
births of their six children, with the names of tlieir 
several god-parents — or "gossips," as they were 
then called — were recorded in my father's hand- 
writing. It is possible that my future life was in 
some degree influenced by finding our little family 
history thus early linked with these sorrowful 
national chronicles. 

My small head ached in the endeavour to follow 
the dry catalogues of deaths (mostly violent ones) 
and predatory expeditions of which the Annals for 
several centuries chiefly consisted. It was consoling 
to arrive at the great events of the Thirty Years' 
War against Elizabeth, The hard names and merci- 
less details of slaughter in the text were enlivened 
by voluminous notes on the overthrow of Bagenal 
and all the other heroic deeds on the banks of the 

I B 



2 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Ulster Blackwater, which I was afterwards destined 
to visit for the first time as Member of Parlia- 
ment for the historic section of country over 
which O'Neill had waged his stubborn wars. I am 
afraid I generally rose from my readings with a 
higher opinion of the annotator than of the Four 
Masters. 

My father was in general repute as one of the 
wisest of advisers. He was the managing clerk of one 
of those grandiose provincial attorneys who, in the 
old Chancery days, carried on vast family lawsuits 
from generation to generation, and had the carriage 
of sale of extensive estates in the Incumbered Estates 
Court. His principal was a florid-faced, majestic 
old gentleman whom I remember blinking wisely 
from behind his gold spectacles in the direction of 
my father (who sat at the opposite side of the 
escritoire), with a quill-pen in his trembling hand, 
grandly affixing his signature to some great skin of 
parchment. He somehow left the impression that 
affixing his signature was his special function in life. 
He was one of the kindest of men. In the summer 
evenings our entire household would walk out to his 
country residence of Farmleigh, on the Cork Road, 
where the children of the two families would race 
their respective donkeys in the fields, while the 
fathers sat under an elm tree over their grog, dis- 
coursing the contents of the skins of parchment, and 
the mothers were exchanging their family confi- 
dences and household receipts, or making ready the 



I MY FATHER AND MOTHER 3 

tea and bread-and-jam with which the festivities 
concluded. 

My father also spent his evenings largely with a 
bank manager in the town, a gentle and somewhat 
ineffectual man, whose chief adviser in all his banking 
transactions I strongly suspect him to have been. 
But of this, or of any other his professional secrets, 
we children could never gather a hint. In business 
matters he was as reserved as the grave. It was 
perhaps one of the reasons why his advice was 
sought with an unfailing confidence on all sorts of 
legal, financial, and domestic troubles. Respect for 
his judgment and integrity of character made him a 
considerable power in the community. Socially, he 
had the gift of making many fast friends. From 
the profusion of bright-coloured satin and velvet 
waistcoats preserved in his wardrobe, after they had 
been for many years out of fashion, I infer that in 
his younger days he had been something of a beau. 
We only knew him in his quiet backgammon days, 
when music was the predominant passion of his 
leisure hours, what time he was not out in his shirt 
sleeves cultivating his garden. He was an adept at 
most musical instruments, including the flute, the 
fiddle, the violoncello, the clarionet, and the cor- 
nopean, and had quite a little library of music folios 
in which, in his own neat hand, he had set forth the 
notation suitable for each. But the fiute was his 
grand passion. He had half-a-dozen instruments of 
varying size, encrusted with all sorts of elaborate 



4 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

keys. When he sat playing in our parlour, with his 
chair tipped against the window-shutters, a crowd 
would sometimes gather in the street to listen. 
With his children he was always appreciative, but, 
in a quiet way, authoritative. I do not recollect his 
ever administering any corporal punishment to any 
of us, but none the less — perhaps all the more — we 
stood in dread of his slightest frown of disapproval. 
Of my mother I almost fear to write at all. The 
truth, in the barest words I can express it in, must 
seem extravagant in the eyes of strangers. When 
I came back to Mallow, after a long absence, an 
unknown youth, to contest a seat in Parliament with 
Her Majesty's Solicitor-General, the reply of many 
an old elector, especially if he were of the old kindly 
Mallow Protestant breed, was, " I don't know much 
about you and I don't like your politics, but I can't 
refuse a vote to Kate Nagle's son." She came of a 
stock which was rooted in Mallow probably even 
longer than the "Big Tree,"^ whose colossal girth 
still decorates the causeway of Mallow Bridge. How 
far or near may have been our connection with the 
aristocratic Nagle family of Annakissy, who gave 
their name to the mountains that stretch across the 
Nagle country, and among whose glorious offshoots 
are numbered James the Second's Irish Chancellor, 
and Nano Nagle, the famous foundress of the Irish 
Ursulines, and the still more famous Edmund Burke 

1 Alas ! since these lines were written the "Big Tree" has followed the 
innumerable Mallow Nagles into the dead past. 



I MY FATHER AND MOTHER 5 

— the connection was always taken for granted in 
family gossip — I have never been at the pains to 
inquire. What is certain is that my grandfather, 
James Nagle, was one of those thriving, jovial, and 
big-hearted merchants who made considerable for- 
tunes in Ireland during the high prices of the 
Napoleonic Wars, and lost them in the years of 
depression that followed. He and his brother Pat — 
of whom history only records that he was a big man 
who broke an iron bar across his knee to show some 
English officer what an Irishman was capable of — 
seem to have been among the principal local poten- 
tates of the day, the Barrys being their most con- 
siderable rivals and friends. " The Nagles for 
bacon and the Barrys for beef," used to be one of 
the current Mallow proverbs of my young days. 

Unhappily, my curiosity in matters of family 
table-talk never arose, so far as it has arisen at all, 
until those who could have given more consistency 
to my vague recollections had passed away. One 
thing seems to stand out clearly in the business 
record of James Nagle — that smuggling formed a 
large and honourable department of his operations. 
I have often heard the old people tell how an honest 
and hilarious old soul in the Excise, long remem- 
bered as " Barry the Ganger," used to be found 
quaffing toasts and singing " Auld Lang Syne" 
upstairs in my grandfather's dining-room, while 
puncheons of whiskey in car-loads were being 
smuggled into the stores below by some com- 



6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

plaisant system of duty-free "permits." Whose 
conscience, indeed, in those days, would have been 
more troubled than Barry the Gauger's at cheating 
England in her impudent attempt to levy off Irish 
whiskey the expense of beating " Boney " ? It is 
one of the regrets of my life that I failed to learn, 
before his contemporaries disappeared, a little more 
about that characteristic figure of " Barry the 
Gauger " and the stirring " Auld Lang Syne " to 
which he drank. But I have heard enough to be 
able to construct for myself a pretty vivid picture 
of the reckless, cheery, hard-drinking, dare-devil 
" Rakes of Mallow," among whom my grandfather 
appears to have been a considerable personage. 
The "Rakes" seem to have hired a club-house 
called " Radical Cottage," at some distance from the 
town, in which they carried on their Homeric orgies 
for whole days together, probably with a view to 
escaping the jurisdiction of their wives. Whence 
the designation " Radical Cottage " I could never 
ascertain, for the reputation of the " Rakes of 
Mallow" has come down to us with a less powerful 
whiff of politics than of the punch-bowl. 

Massive as was James Nagle's frame, and well- 
seasoned as was his head, the insurance company 
with whom his life was insured seem to have been 
prosaic enough to suspect that the potations of 
Radical Cottage had something to say to his prema- 
ture demise, for they refused payment of the policy. 

The last famous rally of the Rakes was on the 



I MY FATHER AND MOTHER 7 

occasion of their expedition to the Cork Assizes as 
witnesses to testify to the soundness of their old 
comrade's head and the shabbiness of the close- 
fisted insurance company. They travelled together 
on the roof of " The Rakes of Mallow Coach" — a 
mail-coach as renowned on the southern road in 
those days as " The Angel " was in Islington — and 
unshrinkingly gave testimony of the faith that was 

in them. It was long told how Bill W , one 

of the most celebrated of the set, whose rolling 
figure, droll eye, and watery lip gave an excellent 
picture of what the board of Radical Cottage must 
have looked like in the festive hour, captured the 
hearts of judge and jury with the obiter dictum : 

Whiskey mix'd with Mallow Spa 
Is the grandest drink you ever saw. 

With the aid of such testimony, an unimaginative 
insurance company naturally met the fate their 
meanness deserved at the hands of a Cork jury. 
A generation afterwards, when the last of the 
Rakes of Mallow had long passed away to meet 
the verdict of a higher and, let us hope, no less 
indulgent tribunal, I heard Isaac Butt, who was 
then the Irish leader, relating in the editor's room of 
the Freeman s Jotirnal the familiar story of the Cork 
trial, in which he had been engaged as counsel, and 

of Bill W 's historic couplet. Great was his 

amazement to find in my pallid and degenerate self 
a descendant of his clients of those distant days. 



8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

In my own day all that remained of the departed 
glories of the Nagles and the Mansfields (my 
maternal grandparents) were certain colossal old 
dining-tables of black mahogany, a pianoforte of 
ancient and coffin-like proportions, under whose 
unsteady legs we loved to risk our youthful lives, 
a tea service of delicately painted china, which 
was only brought out for Christmas holiday feasts, 
and was consequently always associated in my 
mind with currant- cake and a monster Christmas 
candle, together with rare cut-glass decanters and 
"rummers," some cracked and some stemless, which 
had doubtless clinked and sparkled on many an 
Attic night in Radical Cottage. In the prosperous 
days of the family my mother had been brought up 
at the Misses Babington's Young Ladies' Academy, 
Mallow had been for centuries the favoured residence 
of a considerable aristocratic and Protestant com- 
munity, who, in the Elizabethan days, congregated 
there as the seat of government of Munster, and in 
more modern times came there to drink the Spa 
waters and to hunt the foxes of the Duhallow 
country. 

In the Misses Babington's polite establishment 
the girls, gentle and simple, Protestant and Catholic, 
seem to have mingled together with an amenity 
which, I am afraid, is wanting in the more recent 
relations of classes and creeds in Ireland, and which 
served, to a surprising degree, to mitigate the 
brutality of the strict letter of the law in pre- 



I MY FATHER AND MOTHER 9 

emancipation days. Quite half the famiHes with 
whom my earhest recollections of small dances and 
games of forfeits are associated belonged to one or 
other of the half-dozen Protestant sects which had 
their conventicles in Mallow, — to which of them, or 
for what reasons, it never struck us to inquire, no 
more than it struck the occupants of the old grave- 
yard, where Protestant and Catholic reposed side 
by side. The two touchstones of character in the 
Mallow of old were: first, "he was a good neigh- 
bour" ; and second, "he was of the old stock." 

If my mother owed any portion of her accom- 
plishments as a housewife to the Misses Babington, 
as well as her attainments in polite letters, these 
estimable ladies would have little to learn from the 
more pretentious modern training-grounds of the 
New Woman. Making full allowance for childish 
illusions, there can be no manner of doubt that she 
possessed a genius for the production of an infinite 
number of uncommon household dainties such as in 
later years I have found nowhere except perhaps in 
some of the choice old inns of provincial France. 
Under her hands the seasoning of a white pudding 
had something of the aroma of the thymy plots of 
Paradise, and a dish of tripe soused in new milk 
became a supper for the gods. She had the enthu- 
siasm, and perhaps some trace of the sadness, of the 
poet who has never dreamt of making a rhyme. 
She was one of the girls who decorated the banquet- 
ing room in which O'Connell delivered his famous 



lo WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

" Mallow Defiance," the night of the Mallow Mon- 
ster Meeting of " the Repeal Year," and was one of 
those admitted to the gallery during the speeches. 
How often I have seen her soft brown eyes light up 
in all their depths as she repeated the Liberator's 
historic apostrophe, " I'm not that slave ! " in which 
all who were listening to him seemed to hear with 
frantic joy the summons to the battlefield to millions 
of men. She was young, however, and it was Young 
Ireland, rather than Old Ireland, to which her heart 
went out. Thomas Francis Meagher seems to have 
visited Mallow some years afterwards, in all the 
glory of a young Harmodius skilled to wreathe his 
sword with rosy eloquence. I think, when my mother 
talked these things over with the mothers of families 
who were her girl-friends of those days, their eyes 
brightened more at the recollection of the young 
Swordsman than of the old Liberator. Alas ! those 
who saw O'Connell swallow his " Mallow Defiance" 
a few Sundays afterwards at the proclaimed meeting 
in Clontarf, lived to see Meagher's sword prove 
equally ineffectual. For the later school of Irish 
patriotism they were both right in their day and in 
their circumstances. O'Connell was right in trying 
his " Mallow Defiance " upon Peel, and equally 
right and brave in not attempting to make good his 
threat. "Meagher of the Sword," in his turn, was 
at no loss for stout hearts to take up arms, but for 
arms to take up. 

It was in the midst of the insurrectionary tumults 



I MY FATHER AND MOTHER ii 

of '48 that my eldest brother, James Nagle O'Brien, 
was born. My father, as we often taunted him when 
his blood had come to run less hotly, was one of the 
ardent spirits of the local club of the Confederates. 
Upon the day a son was born to him, the local 
officer of police met him and told him he had a 
warrant to search the house for arms. " But," he 
added, with a chivalry which is a lost art with the 
Irish police-officer of more recent date, " I have just 
heard of Mrs. O'Brien's illness, and if you will give me 
your word there are no arms concealed in the house, 
I will not disturb her." Many a year afterwards, 
this officer, Mr. J. Sheridan Macleod, and myself 
chanced to meet pretty often as friendly adversaries. 
He had become a Resident Magistrate, and during 
the Balfour Coercion campaigns was frequently in 
charge of the forces of military and police assembled 
to suppress or arrest me. He sometimes reminded 
me, in a laughing way, of the good turn he once 
did the previous generation of our rebellious house, 
and was under the impression that it was I myself 
who was born under the insurrectionary star of '48. 
One day, in Kilkenny, after a scene of desperate 
conflict between police and people, in which he and 
I bore a not inconsiderable part, he cried out to me, 
wiping his perspiring brow : " It seems as if I were 
never to be done with rebel O'Briens, from your 
cradle to my grave." Mr. Macleod has indeed gone 
to the grave of a gallant gentleman, while the sounds 
of the old, unending battle still fill the air. 



12 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

The "old neighbours" of the Mallow of the 
Forties (their ranks are now thin) still speak of 
" handsome Kate Nagle." The only young im- 
pression on the subject that remains on my memory 
is that once when I saw her in evening dress, setting 
out for some charity bazaar or ball, I had an uneasy 
apprehension that I saw her in spirit-form, and that 
the mother of real life was taking wings to herself 
to depart for heaven. It was a great relief to find 
her moving about the house next day as usual. My 
more mature recollections are of a large and noble 
figure ; of a forehead high and delicately arched ; of 
the large but well-shaped " nose of the Nagles " ; ^' 
a pair of eloquent dark eyes, which were bottomless 
wells of tenderness, and, in reposeful hours, of 
melancholy ; and all set in a smooth framework of 
thick dark hair, thickest where it gathered in a wide 
curve or band about the ears. The years when I 
was most observant were years when sorrow had 
done much to rub out the girlish animation and 
mirthfulness of the Forties ; but to the last hours of 
the agonising disease of which she died, when all 
her children were gone except one who was in prison, 
her sympathetic charm, her wistful tenderness, her 
heroic courage and even sprightly humour in 
moments of sorrow and pain never deserted her. 
By the voluntarily-tendered kindness of Mr. W. E. 
Forster, the Chief Secretary, I was allowed to leave 
Kilmainham Prison from time to time to visit her 
in her last illness. One of the curious sights of 



I MY FATHER AND MOTHER 13 

Dublin in its day was to see the Governor of the 
prison, Captain Dennehy, and myself driving ami- 
cably together through the streets on a jaunting-car 
to the Hospice where she lay dying, and where the 
Governor and the jaunting-car again picked me up 
after the allotted couple of hours. I was finally 
released from prison on the morning on which my 
mother also received her final and happier release. 
The good news was a viaticum which brought into 
her eyes a first ray of heaven. The Sisters of 
Charity, who had come to love her with the filial 
affection of the children she had lost — an affection 
that was none the less human for being also divine 
— were as enthusiastic in their admiration for the 
worn, waxen face, and the deep eyes lighted up with 
the last glow of fondness and joy that morning, as 
could be the most ardent of "the old neighbours" 
at thought of the " handsome Kate Nagle " of the 
days when Young Ireland was really young. 



CHAPTER II 



MY FIRST RECOLLECTIONS 



By a curious paradox, the first thing I can recollect 
in life is — death. It was the death of a sister, a 
year older than myself — a fair-haired little creature, 
with her father's grey-blue eyes, as I judge from a 
miniature painted by an artist who was at the time 
lodging in our house. All that I remember at hrst 
hand of the child, or of the death, was the tramp of 
heavy boots on the stairs, and a certain smell of 
coffin-wood, which made me feel as if it were not so 
pleasant an affair as I was told to be carried away to 
heaven. 

My next recollection — perhaps, for good reason, 
not so vivid — is of a mishap which occurred as I 
was swinging on the high iron gate opening into the 
garden {aetat. probably four or five). The gate was 
badly hung and slipped from its socket, and that is 
all — except a cicatrice at the top of the forehead, 
the deep scar of which has lasted me through life, 
with its attendant headaches. 

But the third great event which stands out from 
the haze of infancy remains before my mind as 

14 



CHAP. li MY FIRST RECOLLECTIONS 15 

accurately in every particular as if it had only occurred 
yesterday. It was on the occasion of a "barring- 
out " at the National School, which was then held 
on the first floor of the Long Room, in the Spa 
Walk. The Long Room, in the days of its pride, 
was the casino or assembly-room where the Grattans 
and Ned Lysaghts proffered snuff-boxes and sat at 
the card-tables and danced minuets in the evenings, 
after drinking the waters and exchanging gentle 
scandal with the wits and beauties at the Pump-Room 
in the Spa Glen during the day. 

The schoolmaster was a man of remarkable 
capacity, an upright, ecclesiastically-minded man, 
who, had he found the right groove, would have 
made a Bishop of commanding ability and dignity, 
but, having slipped into the wrong one, sank into 
a disappointed and irascible pedagogue, at war with 
his parish priest, and regarded by his pupils pretty 
much as Attila must have been regarded by his 
defenceless victims on the plains of Lombardy. A 
heavy box bludgeon, delicately called "the slapper," 
was his principal instrument of government. We 
used to say his temper particularly suffered from the 
meagre fare on fast days. I can still see the blazing 
face with which he returned to the chattering school 
after one of these Barmecide repasts, and, waving 
"the slapper" about his head, rushed through the 
midst of the affrighted urchins, from top to bottom 
of the room, dispensing summary justice, or rather 
injustice, on the little shins and shoulders that 



i6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chak 

strewed his path. It was the recognised pedagogic 
jurisprudence of that day, as the rack and the 
Spanish Maiden were a couple of centuries earh'er. 

RebelHon, however, sometimes fronted Attila to 
his teeth. There was an annual struggle between 
master and pupils for a Christmas vacation of very- 
much the same character as Polignac's tussle with 
the Gavroches of Paris on the barricades. The 
" big boys " were beginning to realise dimly that 
boys, big and little, were made for something more 
exhilarating than strokes of "the slapper" at 
Christmas-tide ; and the poor master, for his part, 
whose revenues were not in proportion to the size 
of his family, not unnaturally remembered that the 
vacation, which might be excellent fun for the boys, 
meant three weeks' stoppage of supplies to his own 
famished exchequer. 

One of these first uprisings against the tyranny 
of the Long Room Bastille had a long-lived renown 
among the schoolboys of Mallow. It occurred sub- 
sequently to my own small adventure, and I was 
myself a mere looker-on — -I suspect, an excessively 
frightened one. While the master was at dinner, 
desks and forms were piled against the door, and 
shouts of " Vacation " answered him rebelliously back 
when he demanded admittance. His threats and 
all the force of his shoulders were of no avail. The 
lads stood their ground behind the barriers, my elder 
brother, Jim, being a ringleader in piling up fresh 
obstacles. It was not until a blacksmith who lived 



n MY FIRST RECOLLECTIONS 17 

a few doors off had been brought on the scene and, 
with all the force of his sledge-hammer, smashed in 
the door, that the master was at last able to rush in, 
terrible as an angry god, over the ruins of the 
barricades. With uplifted club, he made for my 
brother, whose voice, I daresay, he had heard urging 
on the fray. One of the lofty windows of the old 
assembly room was wide open. My brother dived 
towards it, and for a moment stood irresolute on the 
threshold — then, all of a sudden, disappeared into 
space. There was a cry of horror; the master 
stood paralysed, white as death. Then somebody 
near the window looked out into the gulf below, and 
gave a shout of joy. My brother had jumped to 
the top of a load of hay, which was passing at the 
moment, and was jogging along around the corner, 
safe in his comfortable elevation. 

My own little affair was of a less heroic character. 
The elder boys put me up, in my tiny frock and 
drawers, to demand vacation. Doubtless their 
calculation was that my ridiculous smallness and 
rather larger school-fee would protect me from the 
consequences that would have overtaken themselves. 
They were obliged to hoist me on a desk in order 
to make me visible. From that awkward eminence 
I cried out " Vacation ! Vacation ! " It was the first 
speech of my life, and it made its sensation. 
" Vacation ! Vacation ! " shouted the whole school. 
The master, who was writing at his rostrum, bounded 
to his feet, lightning in his eyes, and the box-wood 



i8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

club in his hand. " Who was it that spoke ? " he 
cried, not at once perceiving his diminutive enemy 
on the top of the desk. Under his eyes the boys 
were as silent as the waves under the frown of 
Neptune. Not having, probably, the smallest per- 
ception of the danger, my own small treble voice 
piped calmly away : " Vacation ! Vacation ! " The 
master's eye had now fixed me, and a shudder went 
through the school as he brandished the box-wood 
club, as if to take aim. Suddenly, at sight of the 
small rebel in bib and drawers, he burst into a fit of 
laughter, and whether he yielded to the petition for 
the holidays or no, all I remember for certain is that 
the master was, on that day, in a boisterous good- 
humour, the like of which schoolboy memory never 
found a parallel for before. 

I had not seen the master for some twenty years 
when I one day returned to solicit his vote as an 
elector of Mallow for his little rebel pupil of old. 
The poor man had grown pitifully shrunken and old, 
with many children and few pupils, and almost as 
few scattered hairs, but his dignity, his proud con- 
sciousness of capacities that had never found their 
fitting function in life, were as striking as ever. 
We laughed over the old memories of the Long 
Room, without any malice on either side ; and, truth 
to tell, I never felt, in the honour of being a Member 
of the House of Commons, a spark of my pride in 
the honour of being sent there by men like my old 
schoolmaster, in days when votes in a small borough 



n MY FIRST RECOLLECTIONS 19 

were worth at the least /^t,o apiece, and when £t,o 
might well have called up golden visions to the 
imagination of the disappointed old pedagogue in 
his deserted schoolroom. 

My first memory of one of the foremost Irishmen 
of our generation — Dr. Croke, afterwards Arch- 
bishop of Cashel — dates from these shadowy days. 
He was at the time a curate in Mallow, and, owing 
to a cousinship on my mother's side, was an inti- 
mate family friend. He was a strange compound 
of schoolboy drollery and of sternness in essentials. 
Two of my first impressions remain. One is of a 
sermon on Immortality, with a refrain of " Far, far 
beyond the grave " running through it — as to which 
I can still see the dark figure and hear the dread 
words in which he, so to say, drew aside the cur- 
tain beyond which endless worlds of pain and joy 
revealed themselves. " My dear man," said the 
Archbishop, one Christmas night when I was going 
back upon the sermon at his hospitable fire in 
Thurles — " my dear man " (with one of his roguish 
smiles) " that sermon lasted me all the way to New 
Zealand and back, for fifteen years of my life." The 
other incident was of his playing marbles with me 
once on my way to school, with results that made 
me turn upon him indignantly with the cry, " You're 
a cheat ! " " That's what people have been saying 
of me all my life, because I beat them," was the 
Archbishop's comment, in one of our fireside gossips. 
" But," with one of those unexpressed laughs that 



20 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

diffused a ruddy glow over his rugged face and 
lighted up his blue eyes with fun, " I daresay you 
were right on that occasion, William," 

People who did not know him, and even some 
who ought to have known him better, sometimes so 
far misunderstood his love of a joke and contempt 
for cant as to suspect of insincerity and cunning one 
of the softest-hearted of men, and one of the most 
scrupulous of Churchmen. His character was not 
inaptly hit off in an anecdote I have heard him 
relate of himself with a relish. When Dr. Croke 
was nominated Archbishop of Cashel by Rome, in 
the teeth of the votes of the Tipperary priests, and 
to their bitter disappointment (the feeling ran so 
high that it used to be said the new Archbishop 
had better come to Tipperary with a coat of mail, 
like a landlord, at a time when landlords sometimes 
found a shirt of mail a useful article of wardrobe in 
Tipperary), a priest of the Archdiocese asked a 
priest from the diocese of Cloyne (from which Dr. 
Croke came) : " What sort of a man is this you're 
sending down upon us from Cloyne ? " " Well 
then," was the reply of the Cork priest, "one of 
the queerest fellows you ever laid your eyes upon. 
He'll play pitch-and-toss with you in the morning, 
and suspend you in the evening, if you deserve it." 
Certain it is that if ever the men of Tipperary 
thought of welcoming him with a blunderbuss, he 
lived to see them ready to die for him, to a man. 

Whether my experiences in the game of marbles 



,1 MY FIRST RECOLLECTIONS 21 

had anything to do with it, or whether Dr. Croke 
left Mallow for his New Zealand diocese before I 
was of confessional age, my earliest religious 
relations were not with him, but with a singular 
and stern-looking priest, over six feet in height, a 
scholar and a solitary man, whose face was seldom 
softened with a smile, and who came to be known to 
the awe-stricken parishioners as " Father Danger." 
His eye would disperse a band of " mitching" school- 
boys, or clear the " Navigation Road " of whispering 
lovers, as effectually as a troop of dragoons. To 
bring out his rigour in stronger relief, his fellow- 
curate was an angelic old gentleman, the Abbe 
Moriarty by name, who had spent the greater part 
of his life as the chaplain of a courtly family in 
France, and for whose sweetness of character and 
holiness of life one might search in vain for a parallel 
outside the life of the Poverello of Assisi. I tried, 
very faintly indeed, to reproduce some of the traits of 
the Abbe in the " Father Phil " of Whe^i we were 
Boys, except that, so far as I know, the Abbe never 
bestowed a thought on politics, or indeed upon 
anything else except Heaven and the poor. The 
contrast between the popularity of the two priests 
was always strikingly manifested in the picture of 
their respective confessionals on Saturdays. At 
both wings of the Abbe's confession-box stretched 
long lines of penitents, waiting patiently for many 
hours " to be heard," while there were at most two 
or three venturous figures hovering about " Father 



22 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Danger's " box, on the opposite side of the Church 
(or of " the Chapel," as it was always called in those 
only half-emancipated days). How exactly I came 
to be one of the greatly daring two or three, I 
cannot at all remember; what is certain is that, 
once there, there I remained, as long as " Father 
Danger " was there to receive my confidences, or I 
to hazard them. I sometimes think that if the years 
I spent under his dread rule were the years I can 
look back upon with least trepidation before the 
Eternal Judgment Seat, my terror of sin may have 
been less inspired by the fear of the Lord than by 
the fear of " Father Danger." At any rate, those 
years expand before my memory now in a sun- 
bright stream of innocence and illumination of soul, 
in comparison with which the insensibility and sin 
and paltry preoccupations of later years suggest 
many a heavy reproach. 

I never had the privilege of meeting Father 
Murphy (who died a Canon of Cloyne) in maturer 
years, when I might better have gauged the true 
character behind its outward grimness, but I have 
no doubt his gruff reserve covered much profound 
thinking, a stern patriotism, and a devoted solicitude 
for the warm-hearted people who shivered at his 
approach; and I am quite sure that, in my own 
case, the merciless judge of the confessional was a 
true and loving friend, much as he shrank from 
showing it. 

One instance of his Draconic severity has its 



n MY FIRST RECOLLECTIONS 23 

comic side. I once indulged in the fearful joy 
of mitching from school with a band of older 
truants. We devoted the idle hours to robbing 
an orchard in a secluded place behind the Glens. 
The fact that I could have helped myself to better 
apples in our own orchard, without transgressing 
the Commandments, did not, of course, deter me 
from trying the forbidden fruit, and I am afraid 
the knowledge that the orchard on which we 
descended had no more formidable guardianship 
than that of an old woman and her tongue was not 
one of the least attractions of the expedition for our 
unchivalrous crew. When, in due course, I avowed 
the trembling tale, helpless old woman and all, 
" Father Danger " uttered the one awful word 
" Restitution ! " and shut the slide between him and 
me with a click more dreadful in my ears than the 
sound of Lasciate ogni speransa as I read it in after 
times on hell's gate. What was to be done ? After 
much despairing reflection, I betook myself on my 
solitary pilgrimage up the Gallows-hill road to the 
rifled orchard, probably in at least as miserable 
a frame of mind as some of the wretches who 
formerly mounted the Gallows-hill road on their last 
earthly journey. I called out to the old woman 
from outside the orchard fence, with an uneasy ap- 
prehension that she would recognise me and hand 
me over to public justice. The apprehension was 
groundless, and, on my demand for a pennyworth 
of apples, she proceeded to collect them, and 



24 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap 

brought back a handful of green pippins. My 
resolution was taken. I put into her hand the 
threepence which represented all my earthly savings 
in the pasteboard bank supplied to us children for 
that purpose, and at the same moment, dropping 
the handful of apples at her feet, took to my legs 
and fled as though the Phooka were pursuing me, 
leaving the poor old lady with her apples and her 
threepence, and, I have no doubt, with the most 
extraordinary intellectual puzzle of her life to 
unriddle. 

Our old parish priest. Father Justin M'Carthy, I 
remember chiefly as he used to stand at the outer 
chapel-gate of Sundays, by the side of the collectors 
— immense, august, and grim, a king of men, a 
tower in Israel, with his stout oak stick, his grizzled 
eyebrows, and his great coffee-coloured silk 
handkerchief, in which he blew a note whose 
tantarara seemed to resound through the town. 
Father Justin was the Chairman of O'Connell's 
" Defiance " Banquet ; in one of the bloody affrays 
of the Tithe War, at Gortroe, he rushed into the 
line of fire between the troops and the peasants 
and stopped the bloodshed ; with his own hand he 
cofifined victims of the famine fever, when there was 
nobody else bold enough to coffin them, and some- 
times nobody else to give them coffins. I have 
heard people say he more than once wanted his 
own breakfast while his brother. Father John 
(afterwards Bishop of Cloyne), whom he loved with 



MY FIRST RECOLLECTIONS 25 

all the strength of his soul, lay ill of the pestilence. 
The wild commotion caused by his death pressed 
upon my youthful imagination as one of the 
portents forerunning the end of the world. 

Master O'Connor's box-wood " slapper " was 
not successful as an educationist in my case. The 
effect was to convince everybody, and especially 
myself, that I was a hopeless dunce. Books were 
to me cruel puzzles, and school a place of torment, 
reminding me of the pictures of " Hell opened to 
Christians," where demons were depicted stirring 
up the wicked in their pit of fire, with forks which 
seemed to be simply three-pronged "slappers." 
My mother's views of " the slapper " coincided with 
my own, and I soon followed my elder brother to 
a classical school kept by a worthy old soul, Mr. 
Edward FitzGerald, under whose scratch wig the 
whole world of ancient Greece and Rome was 
palpitating. The reign of "the slapper" was over 
for ever. The utmost pitch of indignation of 
which " Old Edward " (as we used to call him) was 
capable, was a prolonged, agonising " A-a-a-h ! " 
into which he contrived to throw as much expression 
as a French actress, followed, in the case of some 
special enormity, by his seizing the scratch wig and 
flinging it on the table. The injudicious laughed 
betimes, but in the long run the scratch wig proved 
mightier than the sword. To do anything to 
extract "Old Edward's" "A-a-a-h!" came to be 
thought a meanness and a dishonour. To my own 



26 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, h 

amazement, whatever drag -weights had hitherto 
clogged my small brain were all of a sudden 
removed, and the machinery began to work merrily 
away. 

Mr. FitzGerald's pupils (my brother included) 
were mostly intended for the Church. His classes 
accordingly were almost entirely devoted to the 
Greek and Roman classics. I knew all about 
Virgil before ever I read a page of Shakespeare. 
I could construct trashy Greek verses at a time 
when my handwriting in English was little above 
the dignity of pothooks. I could tell nearly every 
battle of the Peloponnesian Wars, as Grote told 
them, years before I had heard of Crecy or 
Agincourt. But to me the miracle was to find that 
anything was to be learned except by torture, or 
that even torture could extract anything from my 
own benumbed brain. At twelve years of age, 
profoundly ignorant of all that was modern, I could 
rattle through all the common school classics — even 
Livy's gnarled sentences and Herodotus' Egyptian 
adventures — with a facility, and even joy, that 
sometimes made " Old Edward's " eyes beam at me 
over his spectacles with a paternal fondness. 



CHAPTER III 



DAYDREAMS 



After drinking deeply of the Pierian spring which 
" Old Edward's " classic wand struck from the rock, 
I was removed to the Cloyne Diocesan College, the 
principal High School of the district. The expense 
was serious, but I think my parents were much 
impressed by the verdict of a lady phrenologist of 
much celebrity in her hour, who made a singularly 
accurate estimate in writing of my brother's mental 
equipment, and, as my own cranium was then in 
too undeveloped a condition for a detailed judg- 
ment, could only be got to say of me that whatever 
was spent on my education would not be wasted. 

The new school was a pretentious villa affair, in 
a park, and the Principal, Mr. J. Wilson Wright, 
was a Trinity College graduate of distinction. His 
French usher, who was a bit of a dandy, was also 
a man of parts. His class, I am afraid, paid less 
attention to Telemachus than to the poor man's 
clumsy way of dyeing his moustache, the black 
evidences of which were painfully visible to the 

least observant eye. 

27 



28 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Three -fourths of the pupils were Protestant. 
Here, again, my experience of the commingHng of 
classes and creeds was of the same happy character 
as all my early recollections of Mallow. During my 
three years at the Diocesan College, I never heard 
a jarring word on any religious topic. We Catholics 
had the advantage of an additional half-hour's liberty 
while our brother pupils were shut up for Scripture 
lessons. The fact did more to sharpen their sense 
of the attractions of Catholicity in the eyes of some 
of our young Scripture-reading comrades than to 
inspire them with any theological ambition to prose- 
lytise us. Nor did the College books of history, 
which were almost inevitably hostile to our own 
prepossessions, have any effect except to harden us 
hopelessly in our sins, since we set out with the 
inflexible determination to believe just the opposite 
of what they told us on all controversial topics. 
For example, Hume was our English historian. 
There was scarcely a date or a fact from cover to 
cover of his History that was not once on the tip 
of my tongue, including every chip of the family 
tree of the Kings of England, with their sisters 
and their cousins and their aunts, from the latest 
Hanoverian duke back to the Conqueror. But all 
this affected my sympathies as little as a table of 
logarithms. I read Hume's heresies about St. 
Thomas a Beckett, and about the hapless Queen of 
Scots, and about the battle of the Boyne with as 
easy a mind as, in days to come, I perused the 



Ill DAYDREAMS 29 

Times articles on " Parnellism and Crime." I 
wanted no stronger evidence as to a given state- 
ment than that it was made by Hume to disbeheve 
it. His way of prancing over the victorious battle- 
fields of England as if she had none but victorious 
battlefields simply drove me to find out for myself 
all about Blankenbergh and the Cadiz expedition, 
Steinkirk and Nieuwirde, Almanza and Fontenoy, 
Walcheren and Toulon, De Ruyter's Broom and 
Burgoyne's Surrender ; and our own Benburbs, and 
Yellow Fords, and Races of Castlebar. 

In fact, we of the Catholic and Nationalist 
minority occupied very much the same position of 
self-reliant strength on the benches of the Cloyne 
Diocesan College as the Irish Party, then in the 
womb of time, afterwards came to occupy on the 
green benches of the House of Commons ; with this 
important difference, indeed, that nobody thought 
of challenging us to combat for our opinions. 

In school hours my mastery of the common 
classics gave me an easy ascendency over the bulk 
of my honest, blunderheaded comrades, who had no 
soul for the languages, and whom I spent half 
my time in helping over the stile. There was no 
danger, however, of the disease diagnosed by the 
Americans as "swelled head." The facility which 
had cost me so little trouble seemed the humblest 
of distinctions. I was only fifteen when I was for- 
tunate enough to win the first prize in the " Senior " 
Division at our annual examinations. The Prin- 



30 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

cipal — "the Skipper" was our irreverent way of 
titling him — read the names of the prize-winners 
solemnly out, and the unexpected sound of my name 
gave my heart a curious twitch, as if a bullet had 
grazed it. My feeling was one of utter incredulity 
at finding myself first at anything. I quite expected 
the " Skipper " to correct himself, and announce 
that there had been some mistake. I am afraid I 
should have willingly swopped all the poets and 
gods of Greece for the honour of being called jfirst, 
or even fifth, by the football captains when picking 
out their rival teams in the playing field. Alas ! 
being the weedy, gawky lad I was, the football 
captains gave me a wide berth, until they had got 
down to the lees of the talent available. My only 
use in the football field was my long legs, and it 
came to be noted as one of the few advantages of 
having me on a side that the big fellows, who were 
demons in a scrimmage, but weak in the classics, 
would sometimes corruptly give me a long run with 
the ball, in consideration of Homeric or Virgilian 
favours to come. 

The young prizeman was, indeed, the most bash- 
ful and insignificant of awkward boys, with a bound- 
less capacity for reverence and an oppressive sense 
of the mystery of things, and was only conscious of 
his own existence at all through a shrinking sense 
of his littleness, such as a fiy might feel amidst the 
mountains of marble and gold in St. Peter's, when 
a Pope's High Mass is at its height. Few men 



Ill DAYDREAMS 31 

have ever lived better fitted to ask, with eyes of 
wonder : 

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, 
And did he stop and speak to you ? 

I have always preferred not to see the objects of my 
reverence too closely, for fear of dispersing the halo 
with which distance invests great objects and great 
men. During all the years I spent hovering about 
the altar as an acolyte, I am sure that I never once 
touched even the outside of the tabernacle. 

Perhaps an early development of the optical 
disease which at one time threatened to deprive me 
of sight may to some extent explain the fact that 
in those days I never quite realised what passed 
behind the red curtains of the choir, and formed to 
myself all sorts of ecstatic theories as to the origin 
of the hymns, for which, as afterwards became clear, 
an ancient harmonium and a shoemaker's daughter 
with a beautiful voice were chiefly responsible. 

Curiously enough, the tendency to idealise, and 
to weave reverential aureoles even about common 
things, pursued me into the English House of 
Commons itself. Politically, I entered the chamber 
with no more mercy for its traditions than Carac- 
tacus would have felt in the Golden House of the 
Csesars, if he had the power (which to a great extent 
we had) of pulling down its pillars about the con- 
querors' ears. But there was a sort of secondary 
consciousness, perhaps derived from Hallam, of awful 



32 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

presences in the background — shades of the patriots 
of the Long ParHament, of the men who measured 
themselves with Kings ; echoes of the undaunted 
words that struck Charles's head off, that arraigned 
Warren Hastings ; of the spirit that, from a rude 
island, raised England to the primacy of the world. 
I am quite sure that, had I been an Englishman, I 
should never have uttered a word above a timid 
*' Hear, hear ! " in that solemn presence. Being an 
Irishman, I could afford only to see the ignorance and 
brutal arrogance that condemned my own sensitive 
nation to centuries of bitter injustice. There were 
plenty of vulgar tyrants and cat-calling coercionists 
opposite us to drown the recollections of the Pyms 
and Burkes and Foxes, and to give us Irishmen a 
fierce joy in trampling upon and dishonouring every 
tradition of their Holy of Holies. 

I once went within an ace of seizing upon and 
smashing the mace of the House of Commons, and 
doubtless having my own head smashed in the 
course of the operation. Could I have forgotten 
that it represented English power in Ireland, I 
should as soon have laid hands on the Ark of the 
Covenant. Even about the Treasury Bench, while 
it was manned with enemies with whom we were 
in deadly conflict, there floated a certain atmos- 
phere, some vague cloud of Olympus, which made 
its denizens seem not quite as other men. I did 
not want to come close to them in a division 
lobby, and be made to see what wrinkled, care- 



I, DAYDREAMS 33 

worn, commonplace creatures of clay they mostly 
were. 

Judge, then, what a world of simple faith in 
everybody and everything except myself possessed 
my worshipping young soul in the chastening days 
of a contemptuous football field and of " Father 
Danger's " confessional. From the first, I can trace 
the love of solitude which the whole of my active 
life has been a vain endeavour to dispel. It arose 
from, or at least first fed upon, the story of the ter^^e 
des Anges which the first hermits established in the 
midst of the golden sands of the Libyan desert. It 
was not that religion in itself, powerful as was its 
spell, was the overmastering attraction. Like all 
well-brought-up Irish boys, I had my daydreams of 
the priesthood, and once cut up a valuable poplin dress 
of my mother's to make unto myself vestments for 
a Mass of my own, at which my little sister officiated 
as acolyte ; but my mother's indignation at the fate 
of her poplin was sufficient to cure me of that 
ambition. Long before suspecting why " quare tristis 
es, anima mea ? et quare conturbas me } " has been 
for endless ages the deepest cry of the human heart, 
the mere golden immensities of the Thebaid, the 
wattled hut under the pines on the summit of 
Alverno, seemed to be in themselves abodes of 
bliss, where Robinson Crusoe became divine. But 
he of Assisi did not loiter a-dreaming in the sunny 
Apennines : he hurried away to the company of 
the lepers. His combination of the delights of the 

D 



34 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

contemplative life with the rude exhilaration of 
active duty was the celestial figure of my own 
blurred terrestrial ideal. Solitary contemplation 
was the luxury, activity the inborn sting and spur, 
the still small voice which always made it im- 
possible for me to be a lazy man, however fervidly 
I pined to be a dreamy one. In the sense of the 
poet's exclamation — 

How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude ! 
But grant me still a friend in my retreat, 
Whom I may whisper, Solitude is sweet — 

a quietude, which some would esteem loneliness, 
has remained to the last for me the solace, the in- 
spiration, the celestial liquor of life and its principal 
prize. 

Nor had my solitariness the slightest tinge of 
sadness. The only form in which I have ever been 
at home in crowded assemblies has been as an 
unknown looker-on, but other people's ways and 
amusements commanded my utmost sympathy and 
admiration so long as I might be allowed to glide 
among them unobserved. 

My ways of amusing myself must have undeni- 
ably seemed peculiar, if anybody knew them. But 
next to nobody did. My favourite eyrie was on 
one of the topmost branches of a " Molly " tree, the 
highest in our garden. Here I would bask by 
the hour upon my gently shaking couch, amidst 
the apple blossoms or the green fruit, to the wrath 
of our honest old factotum Tom Herlihy, who 



Ill DAYDREAMS 35 

rightly considered that my proceedings were not 
conducive to the prosperity of apple blossoms or 
apples on the finest tree in the orchard. Sometimes 
the hours passed in mere wandering thought, 
formless and indolent. It was enough to be 
rocked to and fro by the wind, to look down over 
the orchard — every tree of which to this hour has 
for me its own special name and flavour — to see my 
father, in straw hat and shirt sleeves, filling in his 
trench of celery, or sowing his bed of turnips ; my 
brothers, with half-a-dozen noisy companions, jump- 
ing " Sheela," our pony, over the fences ; my mother 
presiding over the steaming brown teapot in the 
summer-house, while the robins hopped about to 
claim their dividend of the good things. It was all 
delicious, and it was sufificient occupation. 

The thirst for reading was one of the grand 
correctives of this John-o'-dreams propensity. Many 
of the books that have most influenced my life 
present themselves to me, as it were, in a 
binding of apple leaves, with the spacious library 
of open sky and fragrant orchard trees spreading 
around. 

Dangerously little as I had to learn at the High 
School, there, at least, I first got some scent of 
English Literature, and followed up the trail with 
the avidity of a bloodhound. I was not depending 
upon the orthodox school text-books, however, for my 
quarry. In a store-room behind our tiny drawing- 
room, which was usually locked, there lay a con- 



36 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

siderable heap of books piled pell-mell together. 
Whether my father, who was a well-read man, had 
acquired them for his own reading, or whether they 
had come into his possession in one of his capacities 
as an auctioneer, I cannot tell. The room was 
also used for the safe keeping of a monster 
Christmas cake, which a Tralee cousin was in the 
habit of sending us, and it was in one of our raids 
upon the plum-cake that the other treasure of for- 
bidden fruit first presented itself. There was a 
valuable edition of the Letters of Junius in gold- 
stamped yellow leather. The letters themselves 
weighed upon my young mind like lead, but there 
were rare book-plates of the Butes, Shelburnes, 
and Wilkes, to which I paid the Gothic compliment 
of cutting them out and heightening their attractions 
with water-colours of a merit that may be imagined. 
There were eight or ten volumes of Swift, and a 
fine collection of the Waverley Novels. Here also 
I first made acquaintance with Uncle Toby and the 
swearing capacity of the irreverent army in Flanders. 
There was also what must have been a precious 
English edition of Rabelais. I regret to say I 
wholly failed to catch the point or humour of the 
great satire. Friar John's pranks did not at all 
impress me favourably ; Pantagruel's voyage to 
Utopia, having a certain flavour of Robinson 
Crusoe, alone kept me from yawning, while the 
author's ribald words fell upon my ear with as little 
charm as those of some tipsy old man misconducting 



,11 DAYDREAMS 37 

himself grossly. The same cannot be said for the 
seductive adventures of Gil Bias de Santillane, as 
to which I at least came to know that slices of them 
were a guiltier form of indulgence than slices of the 
plum-cake. 

In my father's own bookcase downstairs, along 
with the Douay Bible and the Four Masters, 
Lever's novels, MacNevin's History of the Irish 
Volunteers, and so forth, there was a heavy tome 
reporting the State Trial of O'Connell. This book 
of eight or nine hundred pages I would spend hours 
poring over, during the winter evenings, by the 
fireside, to the intense satisfaction of my father, who 
supposed I was engrossed in the portentous legal 
debates as to demurrers and amendments of the 
indictment, and challenges of the array, and was 
thus developing the " legal mind " which would 
have realised his most ardent vow for my future. 
He little suspected that the real charm of the book 
was the crimes of the traversers, and not the Nisi 
prius antics of their prosecutors. It was not the 
"legal mind" but the "illegal mind" that was in 
full course of development. The only legal impres- 
sions I carried away from my readings — but they 
are impressions of the kind that shape a life — were, 
first, by what foul methods a jury can be packed in 
Ireland; and secondly, what fools were all these 
high and mighty judges and law officers who, by 
embodying in their colossal indictment the choice 
bits of O'Connell's speeches and of the Nations 



SS WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

writings, made their own law books a liberal educa- 
tion in Irish Nationality. 

It is scarcely too much to say that two years of 
my life were devoted to an amusement or folly of a 
more singular character. This was the creation of 
an army complete in all its departments, and its 
manipulation throughout a long series of wars, every 
minutest detail of which was duly recorded. The 
soldiers were of pasteboard ; I cut them out, and 
supplied them with faces and weapons and painted 
their uniforms myself. There were infantry and 
cavalry and artillery — even to the detail of lancers 
and cuirassiers and dragoons. When the force was 
at its height it comprised more than sixty regiments, 
each divided into companies and squadrons, with 
the name of every officer written at the back, and 
the number and company of every soldier. I came 
to know the faces of the generals and colonels, and 
even captains, so familiarly that I could tell their 
names without turning to the back. They, in fact, 
came to be to me living personalities in whose 
fortunes I was sometimes painfully interested. 

A spare room at the top of the house was given 
up to me as the field of war. Here the entire floor 
was often covered with mimic soldiers (they must 
have numbered at least twelve thousand all told), 
waging their pitched battles till the sun went down. 
The idea of this queer Kriegspiel was to work out 
the intestine wars of the five Irish provincial king- 
doms, on the theory that National Unity would 



„, DAYDREAMS 39 

develop itself after all by the survival of the fittest. 
The force was accordingly divided into five armies, 
whose combinations and conflicts under their pro- 
vincial kings dragged along for many a month of 
varying fortunes. I was myself the strategist that 
planned the manoeuvres, surprises, and combinations 
with impartial brain on both sides ; the far-darting 
Apollo who dispensed wounds and death with a 
little steel - tipped arrow ; and the disinterested 
historian who, instantly that the fight was over, 
placed the facts on record in every particular in 
voluminous Orders of the Day. Sternly as I strove 
to an Olympian superiority to the affairs of the small 
mortals in pasteboard arrayed beneath me, I am 
afraid it must be owned that the far-darting Apollo 
was sometimes, at critical moments, a bad shot as 
against the O'Briens. Certain it is that, when the 
wars were interrupted. National evolution was 
tending decisively towards the victory of the 
O'Briens and the men of Munster. Absurd as the 
avowal may seem to be, if I were asked to pick out 
the labour of my life which involved most patience, 
devotion, dogged persistency, and hard work, I 
should be obliged to point to my toy armies and 
their prolonged campaigns. The only consolation I 
can find for the wasted energy is, that it possibly 
helped to train me into habits of patiently thinking 
out details and planning out vast combinations of 
men. 

The wars were waged and their history written 



40 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

wholly for my own edification. The rest of the 
family never exhibited the smallest interest in my 
hobby, until my father once chanced to drop in on 
the field of battle, and with a face of dismay beheld 
the innumerable hosts, and glanced through the 
bulky gazettes in which their campaigns stood re- 
corded. The alarm of the Government at the 
extent of the Fenian movement was at its height at 
the moment. If, in the course of a police search 
for arms and documents, they had come across this 
miniature army, with its minute organisation and 
mysterious records. Heaven only knows what treason- 
able conspiracy they would have supposed to under- 
lie the discovery. I little knew the danger then, 
and went into despair over my father's instant 
resolve to consign the entire host, with their banners 
and books, to the flames, with the ruthlessness of 
another Caliph Omar. The utmost concession he 
would make to my tears was, that they should be 
buried underground in the garden, until quieter 
times. The time came when it was quite safe to 
dig them up again, but in the meantime there had 
come also that heaviest of heavy dragoons, Black 
Care, to summon myself to the first battle of real 
life. The toy soldiers could never come to life 
again. 

What first set me committing my thoughts to 
paper I cannot recall. The habit dates as far back 
as my relish for plum-cakes and seems to have been 
as truly a law of nature. Verse was, of course, the 



Ill 



DAYDREAMS 41 

first way of escape for the mysteries and longings 
that were surging vaguely up for expression. There 
is still in the possession of a friend a ream of note- 
paper, stitched together into a manuscript book, 
valiantly entitled The Poetical Works of William 
O'Brien, amidst clumsily drawn wreaths of sham- 
rocks ; it being further set forth that it was " Pub- 
lished at Ballydaheen, Mallow," the poet and 
publisher being then in his thirteenth year. The 
verses were irredeemable rubbish. All that can be 
pleaded for the Poetical Works is that no human 
eye except my own ever perused them, or was ex- 
pected to peruse them, until, in the break-up of our 
family belongings, many years after, my friend, Mr. 
M'Weeney, lighted upon the comical "publication." 
But my self-sufficing " publications " did not end 
here. It may perhaps be taken as one more proof 
that the journalist is born and not made, that at an 
age when it seemed as little likely I would ever see 
the inside of a newspaper office as the inside of a 
Cabinet Council Chamber, I fell into the habit of 
writing and " publishing " (always for my own un- 
divided perusal) a daily news-sheet, announcing 
my own matured judgments on the events of the 
day. One of these has by some strange chance 
survived and is still in my possession. It bears the 
grandiose title: ''The Voice of Ireland: Printed 
and Published at Mallow," and is a two-column 
sheet of four pages, with learned observations on 
the crowning of the Emperor of Austria as King of 



42 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Hungary, the latest Algerine law for the suppression 
and transportation of the Fenians, and so forth, 
winding up with the fanciful announcement, " Price, 
One Penny." The One Penny was never paid, for 
the good reason, among others, that I kept my 
journalistic secrets wholly to myself. How The 
Voice of Ireland came to be finally smothered I 
cannot now remember. Very likely my journal, 
like my army, somehow came under the eye of my 
father, and alarmed him equally by the clash of pikes 
and rifles in its pages. 

If I kept an army and a daily paper for my 
private amusement, it was through fear of being 
laughed at if I took anybody into my confidence. 
No one was readier to make friends with anybody 
who would be content to talk religion, poetry, or 
patriotism. Most of my little contemporaries 
naturally thought these, like the Latin and Greek 
classics, were subjects for school hours — very 
excellent, but very hard on small boys. Probably 
he among my early schoolfellows with whom I 
should have had most in common was the Very 
Rev. Dr. Sheehan of later days — poet, mystic, 
novelist, and homilist — most delightful of companions 
in his books, but in his unformed school-days as 
pale and dififident and moonstruck as myself But 
he, from the beginning, lived as in a cloister, and 
he had departed for his ecclesiastical training long 
before either of us could have guessed with how 
many strangely congenial thoughts our youthful 



Ill DAYDREAMS 43 

heads were throbbing. Accordingly, it was gener- 
ally alone I found myself rambling towards the 
heather on the top of the mountain, Knockarowra, 
which overlooks the town. The mountain and the 
heather always had a singular fascination for me. 
Stretched, up to the eyes, amidst the clean-smelling 
heather-bells, I would look down with rapture over 
the rich valley of the Blackwater, with the pretty 
town and the country houses of the " aristocracy " 
nestling in the woodlands along its banks, and 
would people the heath with the promised army of 
Fenian deliverers (my brother Jim was always a 
heroic figure in their forefront), marching down 
with dancing plumes and banners to overwhelm the 
staff of the North Cork Militia, which at that time 
represented in Mallow all the available might of 
England. Our favourite weather prophet was this 
mountain. When a rain-cloud enveloped its top, the 
announcement of foul weather was " Daniel Shea has 
his night-cap on," in allusion to some immemorial 
legend of an old man who once lived in a hut upon 
the mountain-side, and was evicted generations ago. 
Many a thousand miles away from Knockarowra, 
I was one night addressing a vast assemblage in 
Philadelphia, and making a collection in aid of the 
Irish cause, when a man, who was one of the most 
thriving citizens of that great community, came on 
the platform, and stuffing a bill for a thousand 
dollars into my hand — "You remember Daniel Shea 
of Knockarowra, and his night- cap .f* I'm his 



44 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

grandson. God bless ye all in Ireland!" It is the 
history of the scattered race for a generation put in 
a nutshell. 

The very poor were the only persons with whom 
I was on thoroughly easy terms. The house in the 
poor suburb of Ballydaheen to which we removed 
from the house in which I was born in the middle 
of the town was a substantial three-storey building 
in the middle of a long string of cabins, amidst 
whose poverty it had a comparatively imposing air, 
like a big brother in better circumstances. My 
father was the owner of a middle interest in the 
houses on our own side of the street, and the weekly 
rents — two shillings at the highest, and sixpence at 
the lowest — were collected by our man-of-all-work, 
Tom Herlihy. I was his constant companion on 
his visitations to the cabins, with the result that, in 
my own small way, I early became acquainted with 
the secrets of Irish poverty, and charmed with its 
picturesque side. It was hard to say whose com- 
panionship I enjoyed the more — Tom's or the 
tenants'. Tom Herlihy was of the old school of 
Irish servants — faithful unto death, reliable as the 
Bank of England, absolutely illiterate, but as safe 
in his figures, juster than most judges, and very 
much more generally respected. Tom's visits meant 
a long and amicable committee of ways and means, 
which was conducted by the side of the fire in the 
Gaelic language. If a week's work was not to be 
had (as, alas ! for half the year it seldom was), Tom 



m DAYDREAMS 45 

smoked the pipe of peace for a while by the fire 
until he was master of the facts, and then handed 
the pipe to the tenant for a " shaugh " by way of 
consolation. If there came a good week, the 
precious shilling, or even an additional shilling of 
arrears, was slowly but cheerfully unwound from 
the corner of the handkerchief. The poor people's 
honesty and the delightful little charities on both 
sides by which the negotiations were conducted 
made upon my young mind an impression which 
has never been rubbed out. 

My incurable propensity for "slumming" gave 
my poor mother some anxious hours. My love for 
the cabins had nothing whatever in common with 
Tolstoi's hobby for wearing a peasant's blouse at 
Yasnaia Paliana. I was too young to have a 
smattering of humanitarian sympathy with the poor. 
On the contrary, I frequented the cabins because 
life in the cabins seemed more delicious than any- 
where else. Their inmates were more to be envied 
than pitied, so snugly sitting in their weird mist 
of turf-smoke together. Once my father took an 
effective way of curing me of the craze. He 
announced that I should have my wish, and that 
they had handed me over altogether to one of our 
labourers, Tom Sheehan by name. I agreed, and 
that evening, when his work was done, accompanied 
Tom Sheehan with a stout heart home to his cabin. 
I found the open fireplace and the fowl winking 
up under the thatch delightful. I was shown a 



46 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

heap of rushes in a dark corner, which was to be 
my bed. Nothing could be better. I was told that 
I should have to get up at six o'clock in the 
morning and follow my new foster-father to weed 
turnips. Still there was no shrinking. Supper- 
time came, and a pot of Indian meal stirabout, 
which had been poked about with a black potstick, 
was turned out for our refreshment. Then my 
craven soul began to fail me. 

" I want my tea," I said, turning away from the 
repulsive mess. 

" Oh ! How could we afford tea ? " was the reply. 

•'Well, then," I said, making a last rally, "give 
me some milk to take with — this ! " dipping a spoon 
into the platter of yellow stuff before me. 

•' Milk ? " said Tom Sheehan in his sternest mood. 
" Maybe you'll be wanting currant cake next ? " 

I looked at him for a moment in terror, not quite 
certain that the ogre to whom I had sold my soul 
would not develop horns and hoofs, and carry me 
off in a flash of fire for the bold boy I was. Then 
I made a dash for the door, unlatched it, and 
fled, howling, until I plunged into the arms of my 
mother, in whose tears I found ample consolation 
for the pitiless public opinion of the rest of the 
family. 

A last word of honest old Tom Herlihy. A 
time of trouble came, as I shall have to tell here- 
after, when we were "expecting the sheriff," and 
the fine old mahogany tables disappeared, and the 



Ill DAYDREAMS 47 

household expenses had to be pared down to the 
last penny. There was no longer much need for 
poor Tom, and his wages had to be taken in reduced 
dividends like the rest ; but, as he used to say, " I 
am too old to begin the world now." Happily for 
him, the time had come not for beginning, but for 
ending it. We struggled along together to the 
last, and one of my latest recollections of our life 
in Mallow was the funeral of Tom Herlihy, which 
somehow seemed to be our own family funeral there 
as well. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FENIAN CYCLE 
1865-1867 

The first time I heard tell of the " Fenians " must 
have been in the early part of the year 1865, when 
I overheard a conversation between my brother and 
one of the senior pupils at Mr. FitzGerald's school. 
I caught the whispered phrase, " The Fenians were 
drilling last night in the Barrister's Wood." In- 
stantly, visions of a moonlight host, who might be 
either mysterious soldiers of liberty or the "good 
people " (as the fairies were still respectfully named), 
took possession of my imagination. To the timid 
question, "Who are the Fenians?" my brother's 
reply was a frown and a threat to "thrash me black 
and blue " if he ever caught me uttering the word 
again. 

He left us soon after for St. Colman's College in 
Fermoy. His mother had fondly marked him out 
for a priest, but he was not long in making up his 
mind that nature had inexorably stamped him for 
a soldier. When he came home on vacation six 

48 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 49 

months after, and announced that he had had 
enough of the Christian classics, his mother wept 
as bitterly as if a soldier he had been, and had been 
brought home dead from the wars. Whether he 
contracted the Fenian fever at St. Colman's, or had 
been himself the means of spreading it there, it is 
not now possible to determine. Dr. Croke, who 
was the President of the College, had in his own 
hot youth volunteered to take John Mitchel's place 
at the head of a journal which was really an armed 
insurrection in type, with the full knowledge that 
the consequence within a very few weeks must be 
either that the ink must be turned into blood or 
he himself transported beyond the seas. He was 
at the Irish College in Paris when the Revolution 
broke out. He often related to me himself how he 
scaled the College walls to find himself in the thick 
of the fighting. Lamartine's revolutionists burned 
the throne, but respected the altar ; priests freely 
blessed the trees of Liberty planted on the ruins of 
Louis- Philippe's feeble tyranny. Dr. Croke was 
one of the recompenses who were decorated by the 
National Assembly for heroism at the barricades. 
That such a man — the idol and the playfellow of his 
students, who was himself, in his towering strength 
and dauntless manhood, the very embodiment of a 
great soldier — must have inspired his students with 
some part of his own passionate Irish patriotism is 
certain. But it is no less certain that he had no 
suspicion that so many of the young fellows under 



50 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

his ferule were at that moment whispering of a 
coming insurrection as an event as sure to come off 
as the summer vacation ; and that, if once he had 
got scent of the conspiracy, he would have stamped 
it out — not for love of England, but for love of 
discipline — with the same thorough-paced determi- 
nation he had shown on the Paris barricades. 

Jim returned home, at all events, to await "the 
Rising," as his one object and vocation in life. He 
could not then avoid dropping hints of what was 
in the air. He read for me poems of his own 
making, which were plain treason, and rattled along 
from stanza to stanza like the crackle of musketry. 
I found him one day replacing a brick behind the 
fireplace in our common bedroom. When through 
curiosity I removed the brick myself, it was to dis- 
cover a revolver in a cavity behind. He used to 
spend much of his time at an old corn mill in 
Arthur's Glen, where it also became one of my 
recreations to work the windlass in hoisting sacks 
of corn to the upper floors and to shovel the maize 
towards the shoots, and listen with ears erect to the 
cryptic political allusions of the miller, Dan Daly, 
and his men. One day I was moving towards the 
door of a disused room, where a former miller had 
dwelt, when Dan Daly cried out, " Don't go in 
there for your life. There's a swarm of bees in the 
chimney." I had turned the handle of the door, 
however, and found the room filled with men. The 
"swarm of bees in the chimney" were men with 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 51 

bullet moulds, casting bullets by the fire, and the 
rest were being drilled by an army pensioner, with 
spades and shovels for their muskets, I should 
myself have joyfully fallen into the ranks without 
any further ratiocination ; but Dan Daly and his 
men, with a consideration for a boy of fourteen 
which I now find charming, however it offended 
me at the time, kept me resolutely out of the secret 
circle ; and my brother, then and to the end of the 
movement, showed a fierce determination to exclude 
me from the dangers he affronted with a light heart 
for himself. " Don't you think 'tis enough to have 
one of the family hanged ? " he once said, with a 
grim jocularity which I scarcely half-understood at 
the time. He would willingly read or sing his own 
treason-songs for me, and be proud of my ardent 
attention ; but beyond that he would seldom, of his 
own volition, lift a corner of the secrecy which was 
beginning to envelop his life. 

By the autumn of 1865, however, the existence 
and the vast dimensions of the conspiracy had 
become a secret of Polichinello. The absurd fizzle, 
from a military point of view, in which the Fenian 
movement ended, when in its broken and headless 
condition it was finally forced to take the field, 
makes it difficult for people nowadays to realise the 
extraordinary ascendency it obtained over the youth 
of the country, and even over the forces of the 
Crown. When a troop of the 6th Carabineers were 
passing through Mallow that summer, we youngsters, 



52 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

who roamed about the livery stables to see them 
grooming their horses, heard them humming the 
Fenian Charter-song, "Hark, the time is coming!" 
at their work, as gleefully and unreservedly as Dan 
Daly and his men would chorus it at the mill. As 
for the North Cork Militia, who were called up for 
training in Mallow that summer, I doubt whether 
there were a dozen men in the regiment, barring the 
officers and staff sergeants, who were not sworn 
Fenians. They applied themselves to their military 
instruction with a fervour unexampled in the history 
of that respectable corps, whose military enthusiasm 
had hitherto confined itself to the thirty shillings'- 
worth of a spree with which the training wound up. 
Even in marching through the streets to the parade- 
ground, I heard them raising the spirit-stirring 
chorus, " Out and make way for the Fenian men ! " 
and chaffing an ancient, podgy, puffing, and per- 
spiring Major Braddell with such good-humoured 
observations as, " Take the world easy, Major. 
The boys won't see you short of a pension when 
the American officers come across." 

The constabulary were, of all the servants of the 
Crown in Ireland, almost the only body who did not 
soften in the Fenian atmosphere. But, even of 
the score of policemen in Mallow, I knew at least 
five who were of my brother's " Circle," and after- 
wards manfully paid the hazard. One of them (I 
believe he has long since passed into a world where 
constabulary black marks will no longer tell against 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 53 

him, so it is safe to give his name) was a genial 
giant of the name of O'Brien, affectionately known 
to the children as " Long John." The " Centre," 
or, as he was more cautiously named, the " Boss," 
of the Mallow district was a shopkeeper in good 
standing, a well set-up and determined-looking man 
of forty, with a soldierly moustache and " Napoleon," 
John Sullivan by name. When in the late autumn 
of 1865 the Government at last struck at the heads 
of the conspiracy, and filled the jails and unloosed 
the informers, Sullivan was one of the first against 
whom a warrant was levelled. There was a general 
sense of uneasiness and gloom as to his fate. The 
evening on which the warrant was to be executed, 
my mother and a lady friend, passing Sullivan's 
house, saw a policeman leaning against the shutters, 
and instinctively looked up at the windows with a 
shudder. The huge policeman quietly sidled up to 
them as they passed, and, with a broad smile on his 
good-humoured face, whispered, " 'Tis all right, 
ma'am. The ' Boss ' is off by the Cork road two 
hours ago ! " It was " Long John " solemnly guard- 
ing the nest from which the bird had flown. 

As for the army pensioners, there was not a town 
or village that could not easily find a drill-master 
for its fire-eyed young conscripts. Tom Condon, 
now one of the members for Tipperary, and himself 
at the time six feet one of high treason, tells (and 
better still sings) a story of the local drill-master in 
Clonmel, which gives an amusing, but absolutely 



54 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

true glimpse of the spirit of the times. One of 
Davis's most popular battle-songs is "The Green 
above the Red ! " There is scarcely a line of it that 
a loyal servant of England could repeat without 
wincing. It begins : 

Full often when our fathers saw the Red above the Green, 
They rose in rude but fierce array with sabre, pike, and skian, 
And over many a noble town and many a field of dead, 
They proudly set the Irish Green above the English Red ! 

The Clonmel pensioner was conscious that the 
loss of his pension must instantly follow a literal 
rendering of such a song. He eluded the difficulty 
by singing it in the following form, with a wink and 
a toss of the head where the suppressed passages 
came in : 

Full often when our fathers saw — fallal de dal de da. 
They rose in rude but fierce array — fallal de dal de da, 
And over many a noble town and many a field of dead, 
They proudly set — fallal de da, fallal de dal de da ! 

By which ingenious casuistry the pensioner re- 
tained his pension and at the same time luxuriated 
in the full aroma of the rebel song. If the English 
reader fails to enjoy the pious fraud in a salaried 
servant of England, he will find food for more 
sombre reflection in the undoubted fact that the 
soldiers in uniform who would have at that moment 
joined in the pensioner's song were numbered by 
the thousand, and that there was hardly a well- 
grown youth in the country who would not have 
helped to swell the chorus. 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 55 

My father frowned at my brother's opinions even 
more severely than at my paper regiments. The 
bitter awakening from his Young Ireland dreams 
and the horrors of the famine years had chilled his 
blood. Largely by his help, a distinguished Mallow 
man, Serjeant Sullivan, who was afterwards Lord 
Chancellor of Ireland, and who, in the labyrinth of 
the interminable " Four Courts " lawsuits of those 
days, had come to honour my father with a special 
intimacy and admiration, had been elected member 
for Mallow. I am afraid there were certain visions 
of his son's soaring into some well - upholstered 
eminence in the Four Courts under this illustrious 
patronage, which were dashed by the rumours of 
Jim's dangerous associations. With perhaps more 
cruelty than we could then have thought, we never 
failed to retort upon him, when he would inveigh 
against the madness of armed rebellion, by remind- 
ing him of his own days in the Confederate Club, 
and of Mr. Macleod's search-warrant. I can now 
better understand the bittern'ess of a father's reflec- 
tion that it might any day be Serjeant Sullivan's 
duty to transport his son to Western Australia instead 
of installing him on velvet in the Four Courts. 

My poor mother's view of the situation, so far 
as she had any inkling of it, was more mixed. A 
vague terror for her boy was uppermost. Then all 
she knew of Fenianism was that it had none of the 
outward sparkle and romance of the Young Ireland 
of her girlish days. It must, I think, be admitted 



56 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

that she who had seen O'Connell in his glory had a 
certain shrinking from a movement whose principal 
personage in her own district was engaged in the 
bakery trade. She would recall for us the Tyrtaean 
songs of The Natioii, and Meagher's words of flame, 
and would, with a sigh, say these were indeed songs 
and men to be proud of. Where were such songs and 
such men now ? To which our answer was the 
somewhat brutal boast of a movement that was not 
rich in literature — that Ireland had had more than 
enough of drawing-room knights and their fopperies. 
A sentiment to which, rather inconsequentially, my 
brother had given voice in a fighting song of his 
own, which was chorussed at many a secret Fenian 
Hallali in the South : — 

Enough of the Voice and the Pen, boys ! 
Let us just try the Rifle — and then, boys, 

We'll die every man, or 

We'll plant our green banner 
Victorious o'er mountain and glen, boys ! 

I am not sure but that in the long run she came 
to think that, perhaps, Jim's songs could hold their 
own with any Nation poet of them all. Possibly it 
is no injustice to her sweet memory to suspect that 
Fenianism distinctly rose in her estimation (such 
air-drawn feminine consolations there be !) when 
she heard it whispered that one of the handsomest 
and most elegant of our young school-friends. Jack 
FitzGerald, was as deep as Jim in all these occult 
doings. 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 57 

Further, my brother's popularity with girls and 
boys alike, if it brought its terrors, was also not 
without its thrill of pride. He was, at the time I 
am writing of, a dashing young giant, barely eighteen 
years of age, with massive shoulders, powerful bones, 
and a strong, square face, lit up with a pair of 
honest blue eyes, full of the giant's tenderness which 
women love. Whenever he was not at work with 
the bullet mould at the mill, he was throwing the 
sledge-hammer at the forge, or " beating a heat " 
with the lustiest of the blacksmiths ; and if the 
mountain road by night often resounded with the 
measured tramp of men, it was still oftener vocal 
with the concerts and dances of blooming girls and 
joyous young rebels on the moonlit summer even- 
ings. All of which, to some extent, conciliated 
maternal softness towards the coming Revolution, 
but, ah ! at what a price of breathless listening for 
the truant's footsteps in the night, never knowing 
what sorrow or tragedy an hour might bring ! with 
what pangs of agony to read of the first Special 
Commissions and transportations, and think where 
the next blow would fall, or how soon the songs and 
dances of the mountain road would end in ruin, 
ignominy, or bloodshed ! 

It requires little wit to ridicule the Fenian Rising 
of 1867 as a " Coroner's-inquest War," None but 
the very shallow will make merry over the ridiculous 
side of a very grave episode in the relations between 
England and the island which she has spent more 



58 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

than seven centuries in endeavouring to tame. In 
the harvest of 1865, there were twenty regiments 
of Militia and at the least eight regiments of regulars 
at the call of any daring military spirit who should 
seize the Pigeon House, Cork and Clonmel Barracks, 
where the garrison were sworn friends. There 
were a hundred thousand — it might be nearer to 
the mark to say two hundred thousand — men in the 
country panting for the arms that would thus have 
been placed in their hands. The Irish of the 
English and Scottish cities were ready for anything. 
The United States were hungering to avenge the 
depredations of the Alabama, and had only just 
disbanded a hundred thousand Irish veterans of the 
Civil War, who would have swarmed across the 
Canadian frontier as joyfully as a bridegroom to his 
marriage feast. It was the psychological moment 
at which a soldier of Phil Sheridan's eye and nerve 
might have at least produced the bloodiest struggle 
England ever had to make for the subjugation of 
Ireland. It was a crisis when Napoleon's aphorism, 
"In war, men are nothing, a man is everything," 
was specially to the point. The Fenians had a 
superabundance of men, but not The Man ; the hour 
passed, the blow that was not struck by them was 
struck at them, and although the conspiracy, de- 
capitated and decimated by transportations, flight, 
and treachery, dragged along for some years more, 
it was but " playing whist for penny points after 
losing a fortune." The Rising, when it did take 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 59 

place, was little better than a display of fireworks, 
where even the fireworks did not go off for want 
of gunpowder ; the performance was organised by 
a group of American officers in order not wholly to 
disappoint the somewhat noisy promises made in 
the chaleur co77imunicative of American mass 



meetmofs. 



Whoever was responsible for committing com- 
pletely unarmed men to such an enterprise was a 
criminal of a very atrocious dye. It would be the 
worst of blunders, however, to form any contemptu- 
ous judgment of those American officers, much less 
of the tens of thousands of young Irishmen who 
rose unquestloningly at their signal. The American 
captain quartered in Mallow was a dusky, wide- 
awake-hatted, square-toed-booted warrior, the half- 
sewn sabre cut across whose cheekbone was a 
sufficient testimony that his record as a soldier was 
not to be disposed of by placing his military title in 
inverted commas, as the English papers were 
accustomed to do with their American prisoners at 
the time. How much truth there was in the 
favourite English taunt that these men were 
luxuriating upon the gold of the credulous Irish- 
Americans, one slight incident may be left to tell. 
A couple of days before the Rising, my brother 
appealed to me for a few shillings I had saved up 
as the price of various jobs of digging, weeding, 
and caterpillar-killing in the garden, and confided 
to me that the money was required in view of the 



6o WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Rising, to release from the pawn office the Captain's 
topcoat, which he had been obHged in his pecuniary- 
extremities to pledge ! There is, doubtless, some- 
thing comical enough in the warrior who was about 
to assail the colossal power of England being obliged 
to begin with a small financial operation for the 
release of his overcoat in view of the campaign, 
but I am quite sure I had more respect for the war- 
worn Captain in his topcoatless predicament than 
if he had appeared before me all glittering with 
gold and feathers. 

The knowledge that a Rising was in contempla- 
tion was almost public property long before it took 
place. I was not, therefore, surprised when one 
afternoon in March my brother, who had spent a 
couple of hours composing some ringing verses 
beginning — 

Be ready, be ready to-night, my boys ! 
Our camp's in the wild wood glen — 

read them over for me, and asked, " Can you guess 
what to-night means?" He would go into no 
further particulars with me, however. It was 
Shrove Tuesday night, and my poor mother, who 
little dreamed of what was before her, had made us 
an enormous dish of pancakes. When the feast 
was over, I followed Jim upstairs, where I found 
him disinterring the revolver from the receptacle at 
the back of the fireplace. He had mounted his 
topcoat, and I noticed that he had stuffed the 



IV 



THE FENIAN CYCLE 6i 



pockets full with pancakes. It was his boyish 
commissariat for the campaign against the power of 
England ! It must be confessed that my own heroic 
contribution to the scene was to break down crying 
— I think it was the second last time in my life I 
was able to indulge in the luxury. He turned upon 
me with a very unusual gruffness. " What the 
mischief do you mean ? " he said ; " they'll hear you !" 
Then relenting, he caught my hand, and whispered 
very softly, "Good-bye, Bill." (I was Bill for my 
father and brothers, and Willie for my mother and 
sister.) "Good-bye, Bill; you'll hear some news 
before morning." He noiselessly undid the bolt 
and was gone into the night, from which a biting 
wind came in upon my face and froze me to the 
heart. 

In the middle of the night I jumped out of 
bed at the sound of heavy tramping in the street. 
Presently a dark mass of men began to pass under 
the window. For a moment my heart bounded 
at the thought that they were the Revolution ! It 
was only too evident, however, that the men in the 
greatcoats and with the sloped rifles were regulars. 
The next day I learned they were a company of 
Rifles, dispatched from Cork during the night to 
reinforce the troops collected at Mallow. Whoever 
sent these few scores of men out on a march of 
twenty-one miles through unknown dangers testified 
that the rebels had not a monopoly of the military 
follies which signalised the Rising. It afterwards 



62 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

turned out that the company of Riflemen marched 
by a road not more than a mile from that by which 
more than two thousand of the Cork Fenians were 
marching out towards the same destination. Had 
the rebels possessed even a hundred guns, the 
Riflemen must have walked into their clutches 
before they could empty a second cartridge. The 
morning broke over a country speckled with a 
slight fall of snow, and swept by a pitiless March 
wind. A deadly stillness brooded over the town 
and the people. Towards mid-day a country gentle- 
man, known familiarly as " Dicky Purcell," rode into 
Ballydaheen at a furious rate, his hat gone and his 
horse white with foam, and flew through the streets 
shoutincr "The Fenians! The Fenians are 
coming!" Less panic-stricken messages arrived 
afterwards with the news that the constabulary 
barrack at Ballyknockane, some five miles away on 
the Cork Road, had been attacked, and that the 
policemen had surrendered. Later on the un- 
fortunate policemen straggled in themselves, stripped 
of their arms and hugely frightened, giving what 
turned out to be a highly imaginative picture of the 
hosts that surrounded their humble fortress. 

A considerable force of infantry, cavalry, and 
artillery had been concentrated in Mallow during 
the night. When I crossed the bridge into the 
town in search of news the streets were in a state 
of wild excitement. A troop of Lancers were stand- 
ing by their saddles at the bridge. A company of 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 63 

Highlanders had their rifles stacked higher up, at 
the top of the street which is now (if I may be 
forgiven the vanity of mentioning a fact which is 
not, perhaps, altogether a vanity) William O'Brien 
Street. The country gentlemen and their wives, 
with their plate and other valuables, were flocking 
in from all sides to take refuge with the army. The 
constabulary of the outlying country stations were 
arriving with carts containing their bedding and 
cooking utensils. The loyal (and I am disposed to 
think a considerable number of the disloyal) were 
being sworn in as special constables in squads. 
The poorer people stood aloof, mute and im- 
penetrable. All sorts of rumours were flying. 
The railways had been torn up, both on the Cork 
and Tipperary sides. There was said to be an 
army of fifty thousand Fenians assembled on the 
Galtee Mountains. The Cork force, which had 
captured the Ballyknockane Barracks, was supposed 
to be in full march on Mallow. I made my way 
towards the railway station, which is situate on 
rising ground over the town, close to the Royal 
Hotel, which the General in command had made 
his headquarters. There was a battery of field-guns 
unlimbered on the plateau beside the station. I saw 
the General take his stand near the guns in the 
midst of a group of his officers, and direct his field- 
glass towards the stretch of white road on which 
the rebel force was every moment expected to make 
its appearance. I have been more than once since 



64 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

face to face with death in shapes more unlovely 
than that which comes out of the mouth of great 
guns, but I never again experienced the same sick- 
ness of suspense, the same feeling of death in the 
soul, that oppressed me during those endless hours 
(I daresay they were only minutes) while I saw the 
artillerymen loading their pieces and watched the 
General's field-glass as it searched the Cork Road, 
and every instant expected to hear the boom of the 
first shell that would burst upon my brother's un- 
armed comrades. 

The cannon had not to speak after all. Sufficient 
of the railway line remained uninjured to enable the 
General to despatch a trainful of infantry to the 
foot of Bottle Hill, across which the Fenians, find- 
ing Mallow occupied in force, were setting out on 
some wild march to join the imaginary army of the 
Galtees. There were not ten serviceable rifles in 
the entire rebel force ; and before many shots had 
been exchanged, the Fenians drew off in the direc- 
tion of Cork and broke up, and the infantry, who 
were in a scarcely more enviable plight through 
cold and hunger, were only too happy to let them 
depart in peace, without even attempting to make 
a prisoner, with the exception of one wounded man 
who was the only victim of the fusillade. 

After dark we, listening for every sound with the 
ears of a Red Indian hunter, heard the garden gate 
opened and the latch of the back door lifted. It was 
my brother, footsore, starving, and utterly crestfallen, 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 65 

with less thought for his supper, or, I am afraid, for 
the martyred hearts that had the worst of his 
adventure, than dejected over the lost illusions of 
twenty-four hours ago, and indignant with the in- 
capacity or treachery that had called men out to 
establish an Irish republic without powder for their 
bullets or guns with which to discharge them. He 
told me that his own revolver was the only service- 
able firearm which was available for the Mallow 
contingent. There was not one rifle to every 
hundred of the men who marched out from Cork 
that night. In their desperation they raided a 
shovel factory, and armed themselves with pitch- 
forks and scythes, wherewith they went forth to 
confront the mig-ht of England ! 

During the night the police thundered at the 
door, and marched him off on a warrant for high 
treason. It must be acknowledged that he was 
treated with singular tenderness by his captors. 
We were allowed to supply him with a mattress for 
his little den in the Bridewell, and the grizzled 
old Bridewell-keeper, while he banged and rattled 
his keys and shouted " Prisoner O'Brien ! " in a 
voice like a cat -o'- nine -tails, if the police were 
listening, would whisper to my mother in an 
amicable growl, " Don't you fret, ma'am ; if you 
had him at home, you could not take better care 
of him." 

I am proud to say that Mallow did not produce 
an informer — that hideous cancer which the Irish 

F 



66 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Secret Society has a fatal gift of developing. But 
what saved my brother was what Dr. Johnson 
would call a " consecrated lie " told by the sergeant's 
wife of the captured police-barrack. The barrack 
was set on fire during the engagement, and the 
rebels made a momentary truce while the sergeant's 
wife and children were enabled to descend by a 
ladder from the burning building. She and my 
brother were old friends, and he took one of the 
squalling infants in his arms, and with some remnant 
of the pancakes with which he had stuffed his 
pockets the previous night soon stilled the youngster's 
troubles. Mrs. Browne was brought to the Bridewell 
to identify the prisoner as one of the attacking party. 
" Oh no ! " she said, staring at my brother with 
blank innocence, " Mr. O'Brien wasn't there at 
all." 

There being no evidence forthcoming, my brother 
was, after a short period of detention on suspicion, 
set free. In time to come the sergeant retired from 
the Force and settled down in business in Mallow, 
and when the gallant young rebel had lain for years 
in his grave, the memory of that morning was still 
sufficiently thrilling for Mrs. Browne to ensure for 
the young rebel's brother her husband's vote, when 
I became a candidate for the representation of 
Mallow. 

Before I pass from the Rising of '67, two incidents 
deserve to be recorded. The first is that the rebel 
commander of that day in Ballyknockane is now 



IV THE FENIAN CYCLE 67 

the honoured representative in Parliament of the 
City of Cork, Mr. James F. X. O'Brien/ He was 
then in the prime of life, and occupied one of the 
most enviable commercial positions in Cork city. 
Having no special office or responsibility in the con- 
spiracy, he bade good-bye to his wife and children, 
and to his prospering career, and went out cheerfully 
that bleak March night to his doom, and finding 
thousands of brave men assembled on Prayer Hill 
without arms, or leaders, or any authoritative word 
why they had been brought there or what they were 
expected to do with their naked hands, he put 
himself at their head, and began the forlorn march 
towards the mythical army of the Galtees. But the 
circumstance I wish to accentuate here is that this 
man, who conducted himself like a hero and a 
chivalrous gentleman in the obscure skirmish at 
the police-barrack, who listened without a quaver 
while he was sentenced to be hanged and quartered 
and buried in the common jail, and afterwards went 
through years of penal servitude without a mur- 
muring word, was one of those who, in brighter 
days, co-operated heart and soul with his old jailer, 
Mr. Gladstone, in his noble endeavour to strike up 
an enduring treaty of peace between the rebels and 
their antagonists of that night, and in doing so, it 
is not too much to say, displayed a more precious 
courage than he stood in need of under the police- 

1 Before this volume was finished my old friend and colleague 
had passed into the silent land. 



68 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, iv 

men's bullets, or in presence of the hanging Judge's 
black cap. 

The other circumstance is, I think, scarcely less 
interesting. Twenty years after the Rising, when 
our struggle with Mr. Balfour was at its fiercest 
heat, an Englishwoman of noble presence and 
still nobler heart, Lady Sandhurst, was one of a 
deputation of sympathetic English folk who attended 
a vast popular meeting in Mallow, to cry out against 
my treatment in the life-and-death conflict that was 
then raging between my jailers and myself within 
the walls of Tullamore Jail. Some months after- 
wards Lady Sandhurst was telling me of her Mallow 
meeting, and I related to her my experience of the 
day of the Rising, when from moment to moment I 
expected to see the first flash of the cannon, remark- 
ing how singular was the transformation of feeling 
which had brought English people to Mallow to 
champion me, where they had once been mustered 
to shoot down my brother. "Why," she said, "I 
was there myself that day. The General you saw 
standing beside the guns at the railway station was 
— my husband ! " 



CHAPTER V 

THE CORK PRESS 
1868-1874 

One day in the beginning of 1867 word came to 
the school that my father's employer, Mr. Farmer, 
was dead, and leave was given to myself and to 
Mr. Farmer's sons, who were also pupils of Mr. 
Wright, to go home. Neither they nor I at all fully 
understood the meaning of the grave faces at home. 
With a curiously varied knowledge of books I 
combined an unfathomable ignorance of the world. 
I was destined never to return to school again. 

It took my father some months to liquidate the 
business of the firm, during which everything seemed 
to go on as usual. After that, we began to realise 
dimly that a change had come over our affairs, but 
it was only in after years I really knew how 
gallantly my father stood four-square to all the 
winds ; for he never dropped a dejected word 
before his children. He fought against ill-fortune 
stoutly, with a dozen different weapons. He became 
an Insurance agent ; but the company stopped pay- 

69 



70 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

ment or fell into some such embarrassment. He 
turned auctioneer ; but rival auctioneers sprang up 
to dispute the humble booty. He was appointed to 
a champagne agency, and the first time I ever 
tasted that generous wine was on a Christmas night, 
when he opened a bottle out of his stock for sam- 
pling ; but Mallow did not offer a promising market 
for the sparkling gold liquor of France, which had 
to be purchased with gold of a more solid con- 
sistency. Then, by degrees, we began to note 
that rare old bits of furniture were disappearing ; 
that Tom Herlihy's weekly account of his adventures 
in search of arrears of rent were listened to with a 
more painful interest ; that the sale of squares of 
cabbage in the garden, and of the apple crop, 
began to be items of importance in the family 
budget. Once there was a judgment against us by 
the head landlord, and we were in daily expectation 
of a seizure by the sheriff. But even then, though 
we were sensible of a peculiar kindness to us on 
the part of the neighbours, as though there was 
somebody dead in the family, I grieve to say the 
circumstance gave us younger children less concern 
than it gave to the honest sheriff's officer himself 
(whose son was a conscript of my brother's '* Circle "), 
and we never found the game of hide-and-seek so 
exhilarating as through the empty bedrooms and 
the shadowy depths of the garret under the slates. 
The sheriff did not arrive after all — by what 
methods disarmed or appeased, I know not — but 



V THE CORK PRESS 71 

my father had to sell his Interest in his house 
property for a song, and to depart for Cork city 
to begin the world again — with head still unbowed 
and without a murmuring word, but, as I now 
know, an altered and broken-hearted man. 

It was then for the first time I learned from my 
mother's face, and from various little domestic 
pinchings, such as the disappearance of butter from 
our breakfast-table, that there was serious trouble 
in the house, and then also the thought first struck 
me that the scribblings and dreamings which had 
begun to occupy me night and day might, by some 
possibility, mean money, and be even as useful as 
Tom Herllhy's rents. This new delight of doing 
battle to kept the wolf from the door was, for me, 
the first suggestion of commercial value in associa- 
tion with writings from which I had as little hoped 
to derive actual coin of the realm as from my manu- 
script journal or my pasteboard army. During all 
these troubled times of the Rising and of the sheriff's 
visit, when there was scarcely a table left in the 
house whereon to scribble, the passion for scribbling 
something, and for dreaming of things I could not 
manage to put on paper, had become an obsession 
as to which I no longer seemed to have any choice. 
Although I had never met a newspaper man, nor 
laid my eyes on a newspaper office, nor received a 
suggestion on the subject from any human being, I 
was already a pressman by as sure a law of nature 
as that by which the sparks fly upwards. And now, 



72 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

by a queer admixture of inborn impulse, family 
affection, and religious duty, it became a devouring 
purpose to force a way for my vocation and to make 
my pen a bread-winner. My persistency may be 
amusingly exemplified by an extract or two from 
a " Precis of Correspondence " which I kept from 
February ist, 1868, being then little more than 
fifteen years old : — 

Feb. 1st Letter to R. Pigott, Esq.,^ asking explana- 
tion of the reticence he has observed with regard to my 
stories, and threatening to withdraw my contributions if 
not satisfied with his answer. Imprudent perhaps, but 
nothing else for it. 

Fed. ^rd. Letter to editor oi Nation, enclosing a story, 
" The Traitor and the Betrayed," for publication in that 
journal, and advising additional space for literary papers. 

Feb. gth. Letter to Pigott, with undoubtedly my last 
appeal for his notice of my letters and price of story 
published. 

Feb. lyth. To G. P. Warren,^ publisher, offering 
for ;^8o my newly completed story " Blasted Hopes, or 
Irish Life in the Present." 

Feb. igth. From G. P. Warren declining my offer. 
At least he answered. Patience, they say, will carry a 
snail to Jerusalem. 

Feb. I gth. Offering same to Cork Weekly Herald. I 
suppose they could not pay. 

Feb. 2ist. Offering same to James Duffy, Dublin. 
Most likely with same result. 

Feb. 2ird. To John Mullany, publisher, enclosing for 
publication in the Catholic Chronicle some sketches of Irish 



1 The hero and victim of the TzV/z^j' Special Commission of 1888. 

2 A Dublin bookseller and publisher of small religious books, who 
must have opened his eyes wide at my impudent proposal. 



V THE CORK PRESS 73 

History, romancified and brightened. Also starting a 
project for my appointment as Southern correspondent 
of that journal. I suppose nothing will come of it as 
usual, but sic itur, etc. 

Feb. 24///. To editor of Irishman, inquiring what has 
happened. Now I can forgive poor Pigott for his 
neglect. Maybe my " Cormac O'Toole " will turn up 
under the new proprietor.^ 

Feb. 2$th. A letter to editor of the Nation, en- 
closing for publication in that journal a satire entitled 
"John Bull's Poor Relation." It has point, and the editor 
is punctual, but I have my misgivings. 

Feb. 2?>th. Very satisfactory news. From Irishman 
I hear that my stories have been only partially examined. 
The Catholic Chronicle has accepted my contributions, 
with thanks, and also my proposal to act as Southern 
reporter. This is good news indeed. 

All this for one month. The " Precis," which 
extends over five years, exhibits equal activity 
month after month, until nearly every newspaper 
and publisher in Ireland, and afterwards a good 
many in London and America, had been plied and 
re-plied with manuscripts and literary proposals. 
The entries are mostly bald. The reader will be 
amused at the evidence of bumptious adolescence 
they betray (for I, who would colour scarlet on the 
slightest physical notice by the least of men, was a 
different person with a pen in my hand). The con- 
tributions were mostly, and most rightfully, rejected 
for the crude stuff they were. 

These extracts are given here only because they 

1 I have no recollection what is referred to here ; probably one 
of Pigott's innumerable financial breakdowns. 



74 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

are life, and also, perhaps, in the hope that they 
may tend to fortify my young countrymen under our 
national temptation to turn aside from purposes 
once enthusiastically conceived, under the discour- 
agements which weigh upon Irish life as depressingly 
as the winding-sheet of our Atlantic mists. As all 
this correspondence was carried on unknown to 
anybody in the house, the mere expenditure for 
postage stamps must have been a serious strain 
upon my meagre pocket-money. 

When the note, " This is good news indeed," 
was made on February 28th, I was probably little 
aware that it marked a turning-point of my life. 
Upon that day, however, my destiny as a pressman 
was sealed for ever. The Catholic Chronicle was 
an ephemeral Dublin weekly, over whose grave, 
nevertheless, there is one person at least in the 
world who can drop a grateful tear. The first 
task I essayed as their Southern correspondent was 
a description of the trial of the romantic young 
Fenian leader, Captain Mackey. He was one of 
many scores of young Irishmen the study of whose 
lives made Isaac Butt a Nationalist and decided 
the later life of Mr. Gladstone. Young, brave, as 
worldly-unwise as you will, but a creature all com- 
pact of high enthusiasm, and as cheerfully ready for 
self-immolation as a Christian virgin in the arena of 
the Colosseum, for more than twelve months, 
while there was a price of ;^500 on his head, " the 
little Captain," as he was called, walked about the 



V THE CORK PRESS 75 

streets of Cork as freely as though he wore the 
coat of darkness of Irish folk-lore. By day he 
spent long hours on his knees in the churches, and 
at night he was frequently engaged in one of those 
daring raids for arms which always captivate the 
popular imagination in Ireland. His adventures 
had all the stronger fascination for myself that my 
brother, in spite of all the disillusions of the 
Rising on Pancake Night, was one of "the little 
Captain's " favourite lieutenants in his midnight 
forays. One night they broke into a Martello 
tower at Fota ; another night a hole was broken 
through the wall of the armoury of the North Cork 
Militia and a couple of hundred rifles carried off, 
with the ready connivance of the sentinels ; still 
again, in broad daylight, half-a-dozen raiders walked 
into the largest gunshop in the principal street of 
the city and helped themselves to sackfuls of re- 
volvers and rifles while the police were patrolling 
and the busy life of the city in full swing on the 
flags outside. "The little Captain's" unlucky hour 
came at last. He was captured, after a desperate 
struggle, in which a policman was killed by a 
revolver shot, and he was put on trial for his life 
before Judge O'Hagan, who was afterwards Lord 
Chancellor of Ireland. 

It was my first step into the rough world, and I 
am quite sure the prisoner in the dock was not 
consumed with apprehensions one half so miserable. 
A place in the court on so august an occasion, and 



76 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

as a representative of the Press, seemed to be an 
ambition as audacious as that of a small urchin who 
should walk into a queen's palace to dine with Her 
Majesty. All the approaches to the court were 
blocked by policemen, hard and blunt as their own 
truncheons. I remember keenly with what trepida- 
tion I exhibited my letter of appointment from the 
Catholic Chronicle to a hectoring constable at the 
court door, and with what a sense of heavenly relief 
I passed on beyond the range of his awful eye and 
his blood-red whiskers. My terror of the reporters 
in the Press seats surpassed even my terror of the 
blood-red whiskers, for the latter represented to 
me mere tyranny, but the hauteur of the reporters 
represented divine right. I soon came to understand 
well enough the indignation with which the regular 
practitioners saw one of the very few seats available 
for them on a busy day occupied by a raw country 
boy representing some ridiculous weekly rag un- 
known. But for the time the stare with which one 
of the gros bonnets of the local reporting corps, 
named Archie M'Dermot (who afterwards turned 
out to be one of the heartiest of good fellows), 
gorgonised me through his eye-glass, made me blush 
and shiver with an uneasinesss which has never 
since been altogether absent whenever I took my 
seat in a court of justice. 

The result of the trial for wilful murder turned 
upon the answer of a head-constable Gale to the 
question whether the shot which killed the police- 



V THE CORK PRESS ^-j 

man was the result of a deliberate aim, or of the 
clash of the head-constable's own revolver with that 
of Captain Mackey in the course of their struggle. 
To the credit of the Irish police, with whom I 
have had many a strenuous hour of conflict, but 
also a good many queerly sympathetic passages, 
the head-constable made the conscientious answer 
which saved "the little Captain's" life. It was on 
a charge of treason felony he was convicted on a 
second trial and sentenced to twelve years' penal 
servitude. I daresay if Mackey 's speech from the 
dock were to be read now in a cold newspaper file, 
what I am going to say would seem to be an 
absurd extravagance ; but having stumbled through 
the philippics of Demosthenes and Cicero as best I 
could in their own tongues, and having heard 
Gladstone, Bright, and Butt at their best, no 
eloquence I have ever read or listened to has come 
to me with so genuine a ring or so overpowering a 
pathos as the simple words in which "the little 
Captain " — a poorly-dressed, sallow, mechanic-look- 
ing youth, of whom you could only see the en- 
thusiasm which suffused his face and all but 
etherealised him into a spirit — quietly reaffirmed his 
love of Ireland and bade a gentle farewell to his 
countrymen. He was himself almost the only 
person in court who did not break down while he 
was speaking. The very Judge had to produce his 
handkerchief again and again to wipe away the 
tears he could not restrain, and in the speech in 



78 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

which he sentenced him to be chained for twelve 
years to the monsters of crime in English jails, said 
the prisoner's words were " worthy of a patriot and 
a Christian gentleman." Let me tell here the last 
scene in the tragedy of *' the little Captain's " life. 
Fifteen years afterwards, when Ireland was in the 
throes of a desperate struggle against one of the 
innumerable Coercion Acts, Captain Mackey bade 
farewell to a happy home in Ohio to return to 
England as an emissary of the Dynamite Con- 
spiracy. He and his brother hired a boat to ex- 
plode a dynamite bomb under one of the buttresses 
of London Bridge early in the morning before there 
was any likelihood of a loss of life through the 
explosion. The explosion came off, with the result 
that the two dynamiters were themselves blown to 
atoms, and a few fragments of the boat were the 
only evidences that survived to tell the tale. If the 
whiff of dynamite about his fate stirs the English 
soul to horror, that last scene under London Bridge 
has a deeper moral if Englishmen would only set 
themselves to reflect what brought the "patriot and 
Christian gentleman " of Lord O'Hagan's speech 
to die the death of a dynamiter in the heart of 
England. 

It may easily be conceived that it did not require 
much art to give a touching account of a scene which 
moved the very Judge to tears. A week or two 
after the trial I was returning through Prince's 
Street from the market, with a basket of potatoes 



V THE CORK PRESS 79 

for our dinner, when I met Mr. David A. Nagle, 
proprietor of the Cork Daily Herald, and also one 
of the firm of Tracy and Nagle, solicitors, with 
whom my father had now found employment. Mr. 
Nagle, who was a remote relative of my mother, 
concealed a soft heart behind a gruff abruptness. 
"Good-morrow, boy," he growled. "Was it you 
did that thing about Mackey's trial ? " My flushed 
face made the reply my lips could not. "Would 
you like to get on the paper } " Would the wretch 
sitting by the Pool of Bethesda like to see the 
angel descending to stir the waters ? My eager 
eyes made a sufficiently plain answer. " Very well. 
Turn up at the Herald office to-morrow morning 
at eleven," and he was gone. 

I turned out the basket of potatoes under my 
mother's eyes that morning with as much pride as if 
they were as many nuggets of gold I had brought 
home. 

In these days, when everybody writes for the 
Press, and the mystery that once hung about a 
newspaper office has been completely dissipated by 
the light of common day, it would be impossible to 
give even a faint idea of the virgin raptures of my 
first relations with the Press. I approached the 
Herald office with the same awe with which I should 
have entered a sanctuary. The powers within were 
equally unknown, and only less deserving of rever- 
ence and wonder. The printing machine was a 
miracle - worker ; the editor a veiled prophet to 



8o WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

whom I hardly dared to raise my eyes ; the cabal- 
istic signs of shorthand (now as familiar as pothooks 
in every village school) were the privileged language 
of a mysterious brotherhood, who were everywhere 
without being visible, and enjoyed Ariel's gift " to 
fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the 
curl'd clouds," in order to tickle the public every 
morning unobserved. I was taken aback to find 
the chief reporter, Mr. Barry, to whom I was 
handed over, tossing his first-born baby in his arms, 
like the common garden parent. Maybe, it was not 
immediately evident where the baby came in in this 
mysterious priesthood ; maybe, it did not seem alto- 
gether proper that so young a man should be a 
father and not even be ashamed of the fact ; but 
it took many months, if I should not say years, of 
realism in the least to take the bloom off the childish 
joy and reverence with which I worshipped in these 
secret crypts and chapels of the Press, with their 
bare walls and their ancient smell of oil and paste 
and rotting newspaper files, and their occult pro- 
cesses by which the page scribbled in my execrable 
handwriting came out from the black dungeons 
downstairs as a divine Mercury to fly "on the wings 
of the Press " through an entire province before 
breakfast. 

In nothing has the status of the Press been more 
completely transformed within the last quarter of a 
century than in that of the reporters. To-day, they 
are highly paid and petted ; their table is recognised 



V THE CORK PRESS 8i 

as a more important part of a public gathering than 
the platform ; they have shaken off all taint of 
Bohemianism ; they have grown to be respected 
citizens and fathers of families ; and, as the price of 
their material prosperity, have lost three-fourths of 
their charm and mystery for the public. As the 
Parisians say, they have " come on the Boule- 
vards," far from the picturesque garrets of the 
Latin Quarter, ages away from the raggedness 
and sans-gine of the Schaunards and the Mimi 
Pinsons of Murger's Vie de Boheme. Even in 
my first days of journalism there was a decided 
tendency towards the respectability of Archie 
M'Dermot's eye-glass and Mr. Barry's baby. But 
there was still left (until death swept them untimely 
away) a curious band of reckless, charming, wildly 
unconventional, and, I am sorry to say, hard-drink- 
ing pressmen, who were welcome everywhere, and 
were free to hobnob with judges, town councillors, 
or bishops, to walk into the most august assembly 
of grand jurors or priests or wedding guests, with- 
out anybody dreaming of making any remark as to 
the condition of their linen or their contempt for 
gloves. It was among this pleasant set, who were 
naturally the more indulgent to newcomers, that my 
lines principally fell, and perilous indeed was the 
cavern of delights they opened to me. By an eight 
o'clock train in the morning we would set out to 
attend some country Board of Guardians, where a 
rough-tongued democrat here and there was begin- 



82 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

ning to beard the haughty ex officio Guardians, who 
had hitherto reigned as gods ; or a Farmers' Club, 
who were timidly pleading for "the three F's" in 
days when a demand for the abolition of landlordism 
would have sounded like a demand for the abolition 
of the solar system ; or, again, to a country race- 
meeting ; or to pronounce our profound judgment on 
the beasts at a local cattle show, as to which I 
remember a learned wager between us once on the 
question whether the "shorthorns" — then famed on 
every agriculturist's tongue — were sheep or cattle. 
In the evening, we would reassemble to "do town." 
•* Doing town " meant a series of calls to the Bride- 
well, the Morgue, the Infirmaries, and the police- 
stations, and a general hovering round the resorts 
of men and the fountainheads of news late into the 
night. When this fly-by-night existence began for 
me, there were Fenian raids for arms or police 
descents on Fenian armouries every other week, 
and it was seldom safe to give over our nightly 
patrols before one or two o'clock in the morning. 
These long hours of waiting were passed in a pil- 
grimage from billiard-room to betting-club, from a 
late oyster-house to a still later drinking- saloon, 
where one was admitted by peculiar knocks and 
passwords at advanced hours of the morning. 

It was a life of endless variety and adventure, 
and was the means of affording me such a knowledge 
as perhaps pressmen only can have of the seamy 
side of life, both in the upper world and in the 



V THE CORK PRESS 83 

under world of a great city. But it was knowledge 
purchased at a dangerous price for a raw country 
lad — purchased, indeed, at the price of an early 
grave for a good many of my reckless contem- 
poraries. One of them, whom I remember a merry 
dog before his comical up-tilted nose grew over-red, 
went from failure to failure, until he even failed in 
committing suicide. He hanged himself, and was 
cut down half-dead ; he cut his throat so ill that the 
surgeons were able to save him ; it was not until he 
put the muzzle of a revolver in his mouth and hred 
that he achieved his first — and last — success in a 
world where yet it was against himself alone he was 
a criminal. Another of these poor vaincus de la vie 
was to me a very much dearer friend, and his fate 
was all but as tragic. He was the show boy of his 
college, the pet of his professors, the envy of the 
parents of less brilliant striplings. He was a 
universal genius — an actor, a painter, a musician, 
an unrivalled entertainer. He could do almost 
everything — except earn his bread. His fall from 
this glittering youth, through the successive stages 
of a dissipated life and an unhappy marriage, down 
to the deepest depths of the begging letter-writer 
and the outcast, is perhaps the saddest of the woe- 
fully many tragedies to which the sunny and genial 
Irish nature, once deprived of some sustaining 
moral purpose, is peculiarly liable. His genius pur- 
sued him even into the begging letter-writing days. 
However savagely you vowed to read no more, 



84 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

before you had got into the third sentence of his 
plea of Steerforth — " Think of me at my best," Steer- 
forth had conquered as victoriously as in the old 
days on the stage of St. Colman's. Archbishop 
Croke, who was once his professor and to the end 
his benefactor, used to say, " Charley would coax 
the keys of heaven out of St. Peter." The last 
I heard of poor Charley was a scrawl on a dirty 
scrap of paper, on which some good-hearted pauper, 
who had attended him in his last illness in the work- 
house of his native town, told me his last wish was 
that he should send me his blessing. 

It was not in the least through any merit of my 
own I escaped the perils of these seductive days. 
It was very largely, though I hope not wholly, 
through the mere organic temperament, or whatever 
it may be called, which, up to a late hour of my life, 
made it impossible for me to swallow whiskey or 
brandy without grimacing, and associated the sound 
of billiard balls and the smell of tobacco smoke in my 
mind with a something physically objectionable and 
of evil omen. The consequence was that, while 
I enjoyed my experiences intensely as so many 
magical adventures in strange countries, the novelty 
in due time began to pall, and my own natural taste 
for seclusion, for books, for the dreams and activities 
of the intellect reasserted itself with an irresistible 
force. To the enforced omniscience of my Press 
life, however, I will always feel indebted for a 
peculiarly rich and varied knowledge of life, from 



V THE CORK PRESS 85 

which my native timidity would have otherwise 
hopelessly debarred me. Of all the enticing privi- 
leges of the calling, that of free admission to the 
local theatre was that which left the deepest impres- 
sion on my youth. If I could find mystery in the 
grimy machine-room of a newspaper office, the stage 
was an Olympian heaven. It would be idle to 
expect a precocious generation that knows every 
pulley in the mechanism of a pantomime to under- 
stand in the least the infatuation of these youthful 
ages of faith. One of the first scenes that dazzled 
my eyes was really an assembly of the gods — in an 
opdra-bouffe called, I think, Ixion. But, indeed, 
before the scene was half through, the banquet of 
the divinities and their glittering abode were all 
forgotten, and one figure alone filled the stage, and 
filled the whole heaven for me. It was a "Gany- 
mede " in a pale lilac tunic, with large, beseeching 
eyes, and a voice with the soft sound of an Angelas 
bell — " Ganymede " being a young lady for a smile 
from whom the entire gilded youth of Cork were 
ready to die in arms. Even at this distance of time 
it seems an irreverence to say a word in the public 
hearing of a passion which was as true and deep and 
sacred as any " Pitifull Hystory " of Capulet's garden. 
Night by night I was content to sit there in the 
stalls, like a burning candle before her altar, equally 
ardent and equally mute. In my newspaper notices 
I am afraid I was as apt as elsewhere to forget that 
there was any other figure occupying the stage. 



86 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

I daresay the good-natured Manager early saw- 
how the land lay, for, although it would have seemed 
to me a presumption, if not a blasphemy, to ask for 
an introduction, he one night laughingly introduced 
me as " the young fool we cannot get to see any- 
thing in this theatre except your eyes." She 
fastened those formidable eyes upon me with a 
smile of amused kindness, with the remark " How 
jolly ! " I could not answer a word, but if I had 
spoken Sapphic odes to her, my reward could not 
have seemed richer. We had only met three times 
— meetings full of raptures on the one side and of 
wonderful if somewhat sceptical good-nature on the 
other — when, greatly daring, I asked her to marry 
me. I was at the time of the mature age of sixteen 
years and three months. Whether it is that she 
found in my boyish devotion a something more 
genuinely savouring of true love than the bouquets 
and flatteries of my numerous rivals, I know not, 
but she seemed to hesitate for some time, and made 
no answer. 

Then a terrible blow fell. My father died 
suddenly of heart disease in a Turkish bath. Before 
the message from the baths could summon us to 
his side, he had ceased to live. A week or two 
previously, in a moment of depression, he had re- 
marked to my mother, "It will be a good job for 
the children when I am dead," evidently making 
allusion to two policies of insurance to the amount 
of above ;^2000 which he had made on his life. 



V THE CORK PRESS 87 

But he, who had once been one of the most 
systematic of business men, was too reserved to say 
more, and left us no indication of the state of his 
affairs. We had no money to pay the lawyers to 
bring the holders of the policies to an account, and 
the fund on which he had fondly counted as a pro- 
vision for his children never produced a shilling. 
Misfortune seldom rains but it pours. My brother 
had just thrown up his position in a brewery to take 
part in a demonstration in honour of the Manchester 
Martyrs, in defiance of the veto of his employers, 
and the livelihood of the entire household now hung 
b}^ the thread of my own slender salary. To me, 
revolving a hundred projects and bombarding news- 
papers and publishers with unconquerable manu- 
scripts, the addition of one more to a family circle 
of six seemed the smallest of the difficulties of the 
situation. Her own practical good sense and less 
heated feelings, however, guided her to a saner 
decision. 

For seventeen years after, while I saw her or 
heard of her no more, there was a secret chamber of 
my heart where, as Miss Havisham in Great 
Expectations preserved her untasted wedding feast, 
I enshrined with a certain mournful piety the faded 
flowers and sweetmeats of our brief idyll. One day 
in 1885 I received a black-bordered letter from her 
in the House of Commons, asking if I was the same 
William O'Brien of the Cork Theatre long ago. I 
found that she had been twice happily married, and 



88 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, v 

was the mother of a charming family. We found 
also that we had drifted asunder, far as the North 
Pole is from the South, in all our ways and 
sympathies, and that in all the frigid distances 
between, our only common country was the sun- 
bright memory of our three meetings in the Cork of 
long ago — 

When all the world and love was young, 
And truth on every shepherd's tongue. 

In that brief tract of youth, at all events, there 
grew no thorns and there rested no cloud. We 
could both look back on the Olympian heaven with 
a certain evening tenderness and calm. 



CHAPTER VI 

MY FIRST WORD AND LAST ON IRISH AFFAIRS 
1870-1874 

Dec. 20th, 1870. A letter to the Daily News on Eng- 
land's Opportunity in Ireland. If I only had a name that 
would make it worth their while to print it! It is my 
first word in Irish politics. Who can tell where to-day's 
beginning will end ? Most likely in a prison or an early 
<^rave, as such things generally do in Ireland. I am 
tossed about between two half-beliefs — one, that I could 
be of some public use ; and the other, that I am an idiot 
to trust to such fancies. All the same, I know I am right 
in this, if anybody would only listen ! 

The Daily News did print it. A few entries 
lower down in my note-book comes the following : — 

Jan. 2nd. Prodigious ! Letter appears in Daily NewSy 
double-leaded under heading " An Irish Rebel's View of 
the Irish Situation." It has been copied by the Irish 
papers, and is the talk of Rebel Cork. Jim guessed, and 
in his Rebel way approves, but laughs at the notion that 
England will listen to anything in Ireland, except chapel- 
bells.i 



^ In allusion to Mr. Gladstone's famous confession that the in- 
tensity of Fenianism had acted as a chapel-bell to rouse the conscience 
of England to "the vast importance of the Irish controversy." 

89 



90 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

The Three Judges of the Parnell Commission of 
1888 in their wisdom reported that I, with eleven 
others named, joined the Land League movement 
" with the intention by its means to bring about the 
absolute independence of Ireland as a separate 
nation." The Land League movement, no doubt, 
was in the nature of a "chapel-bell," and my brother 
was right in anticipating that England would attend 
to nothing from Ireland until its tocsin rang in her 
ears. But there is, perhaps, no better way of show- 
ing how ludicrously the three worthy English Judges 
blundered in their appreciation of Irish affairs, when 
they concluded that I had started out in life as an 
irreconcilable enemy of England, than to reprint 
this first declaration of my political creed, written 
from the very hotbed of Irish disaffection, and at an 
age (a month or two more than seventeen) when 
there was not much temptation to make any 
Machiavelian disguise of my feelings. Lengthy as 
the letter is, it had better be given in its entirety, 
lest there should be any suspicion that the general 
sense was altered by the passages omitted. 

Saturday^ 2,1 st Dec. 1870. 

An Irish Rebel's View of Irish Politics 

To the Editor of the Daily News. 

Sir — If I venture to address to you a few observations 
relating to Ireland, which are at variance with your ideas 
and possibly distasteful to you, it is in the confidence that, 
through your columns, I convey myself to the mass of those 



VI MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 91 

English Liberals who have proved themselves equal to the 
duty of approaching Irish questions from an Irish point of 
view. I do not claim your indulgence as the spokesman 
of any particular section of my countrymen, but rather 
as the echo of convictions which are, I believe, steadily 
gaining ground among all classes of thinking Irishmen. 

You will agree with me, Sir, that the present moment 
is a most opportune one for the revision of the 
relations between Great Britain and Ireland. On the 
part of Ireland, the advance of Liberal opinion in England 
— the unequivocal change for the better in the Govern- 
ment — the eradication of two monstrous anomalies — and 
finally the great act of justice, which has preached oblivion 
of the past — all these have contributed, with a livelier inter- 
course between the peoples, to clear away many ancient 
prejudices, and enable men to examine their position in 
a mood of calmness and conciliation. On the part of 
England, the late astounding events on the Continent, 
the gathering cloud of hostility and danger from abroad, 
the powerlessness of her friends and the mightiness of her 
enemies, have disposed her perhaps, more anxiously than 
ever before, to enlist in her alliance by a real union, a 
people whose enmity is an undying danger, but whose 
friendship would give her a colossal strength. The 
opportunity is propitious. One month, nay, one week, 
might plunge England in a death-struggle. Will any 
sane man say that she could afford to have a nation of 
deadly foes in her very bosom ? And that she will have 
such foes, should her relations with Ireland remain 
unchanged, permit me. Sir, to record my solemn conviction. 
It is worse than idle, it is mischievous, to say that the 
measure of English justice to Ireland is complete. If it 
is, then sooner or later nothing can avert a death-struggle 
between the two nations. But as a believer in the 
possibility of a real union between the countries, I rejoice 
to think that the work of English Justice to Ireland has 
only been inaugurated. In sweeping away the past, with 



92 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

its bitter memories, Mr. Gladstone has done well. Let 
him now complete his task by provision for the future. 
On the nature of that provision, the happiness, perhaps 
the existence, of the two nations infallibly depends. The 
time for the new treaty, of which Mr. Bright has spoken, 
is come. A short time, and the opportunity may have 
passed away for ever. The crisis is, in my judgment, a 
turning-point in England's domestic history. It is in no 
spirit of factious braggadocio I would earnestly appeal to 
the patriotism and enlightenment of Englishmen, beseech- 
ing them to approach the consideration of the Irish 
question with all the moderation they are capable of It 
will be said, speciously enough, that it is rather hard to 
ask Englishmen to confront a new Irish difficulty, when 
they had been led to believe that the concessions on the 
Land and Church questions had settled it for ever. 

But who led them to any such belief? Assuredly not 
the Irish people, whose aspirations for national liberty 
have never yet been relinquished in the darkest hour of 
their tribulation, and least of all at a time like the present, 
when their numbers and their spirit constitute them a dis- 
tinct power in the world. True, they have accepted the 
disestablishment of the Church with gratitude, so with the 
Land Bill, so, emphatically, with the political amnesty, such 
as it is. But they accepted them solely as steps towards 
one greater concession for which they have yearned, and 
which they have never compromised their right to, the 
privilege, namely, of self-government It is the worst and 
most fatal of delusions to imagine that any large body of 
Irishmen are at the present moment loyal at their hearts to 
England. Again I appeal to Englishmen not to wilfully 
shut their eyes to the all-pervading conviction among Irish- 
men. It is needless to mince the issue — the Irish nation 
is at this moment in the balance between independent 
union with England or an independent republic without it. 
Heaven only knows on what little provocation the weight 
might incline to the more desperate side. It will not be 



VI MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 93 

necessary for me, Sir, I apprehend, to pile up evidence of 
this fact to satisfy anybody acquainted with genuine 
Irish feeling. Such evidence must lie in abundance in 
the hands of the officers of the Crown in this country. It 
will be no news to the authorities in Dublin Castle to learn 
that the active machinery of disloyalty is in full activity, 
and that, step by step, the entire middle, as well as the 
lower and farmer classes, have notoriously thrown them- 
selves in with the popular cause, — that in fact, disloyalty, 
in one shape or other, has become the creed of nine-tenths 
of the population. My assertion may seem strange to 
people removed from the influences which have made 
"Irishman" and "Nationalist" synonymous, but, believe 
me. Sir, it will not be seriously questioned by those who 
are charged with observing the tone of opinion in Ireland. 
No one will admit more readily than I that British power 
may again succeed in trampling down active sedition — that 
over and over again Irishmen may be flung into the cells 
now vacated by the " Fenians " — that the old, old tragedy 
of unsuccessful revolution may be repeated ad infinitum. 
But be assured the suffering will only consecrate and 
strengthen the Cause, until one, day or other, some resistless 
Conquerors of Europe or the mighty power of America 
will swoop down to effectuate the work which Irish dis- 
loyalty has commenced. History should totally rearrange 
her probabilities were it otherwise. To avert a future so 
big with ruin and despair to both nations would be a 
task to immortalise a statesman. I am very much 
mistaken if the statesman is not there as well as the 
opportunity. Let there be no mistake. Irishmen have 
no fancy for inaugurating scenes of bloodshed and misery, 
which can at best only leave their country a hideous 
charnel-house and a plague-spot among the nations. 
At the present time, especially, they are amenable to any 
sensible national arrangement that would obviate so dire 
a calamity. But, come weal, come woe, they will accept 
all the consequences if they be not speedily won over to 



94 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

an equality of independence. What the basis and ternis 
of that equality should be, I cannot here discuss, but I am 
persuaded that a conference of a few of the leading men 
of both nations would result in such a compromise as 
would for ever cement the connection of those countries, 
and re-establish them in the position of a European 
great power. What the consequent mutual advantages 
would be it is needless to recount. I only speak of public 
policy. Once more, Sir, I have to plead, in extenuation 
of the length of this letter, the importance of its subject. 
You will appreciate it the more when I say that I write 
from a city that glories in the name of " Rebel " — in the 
midst of a population of 80,000, 60,000 of whom at least 
are actively or passively disloyal. They are yet open to 
honourable conciliation. Who can tell how long they will 
remain so ? — I have the honour to remain. Sir, your 
obedient servant, A CORK REBEL. 

Hov^ever jejune may be its phraseology, this 
boyish manifesto, the first I ever penned, contains 
the substance of the political creed of my life. I 
should not greatly care to alter a comma in it, after 
thirty years for reconsideration. 

Speaking in the Dublin City Hall, on August 9th, 
1902, on the occasion of King Edward's Coronation, 
I repeated all but verbatim what I had written in 
the Daily News thirty-two years before : — 

I have done my part, and will be neither afraid nor 
ashamed to do my part again, for hearty peace between 
these two countries. ... I should be very sorry to say 
anything personally unkind in reference to the King 
himself, but I hold that it is in the highest sense the 
constitutional duty of the representatives of Ireland to 
warn His Majesty, and to warn all whom it may concern, 
that the rejection of Home Rule by England, so far from 



VI MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 95 

disposing of Home Rule, has brought about such a state 
of feeling among the Irish race that those racial passions 
which Gladstone and Parnell would have set at rest are 
again free to take possession of the young men of 
Ireland, and that in point of fact, for many of the younger 
generation who are growing up in Ireland to-day, it is no 
longer a question between English Rule and Home Rule, 
but it is a question between Home Rule and an Irish 
Republic. 

In 1902 as in 1870, the message to England, 
" Friends, if you will let us ; Rebels, if you will 
drive us," is a fair summary of my frame of mind, 
and so will continue to be " from the morning 
watch even unto the night." 

If few public men can repeat their own early 
opinions without revision thirty years after, the 
credit is not to be attributed to any specially 
meritorious consistency on my part so much as to 
the fact that there are certain root-principles of 
Irish life which are as unchangeable as the law of 
gravitation, and that every change which has taken 
place since the Daily News printed the letter of 
"A Cork Rebel" has been a change tending to 
justify and confirm those principles rather than to 
displace them. Every Act of Parliament since 
passed for Ireland is an endorsement of them, and 
a rebuke to the prejudices and calumnies which 
obstructed them. In every conflict of opinion, it is 
Ireland which has proved to be wholly right, and 
her governors to be wholly wrong. It is surely a 
humiliating comment on the capacity of the 



96 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

English Parliament to govern Ireland, that an Irish 
lad of seventeen should have been able to foresee 
Gladstone's possibilities as a conciliator of Ire- 
land fifteen years before he introduced his Home 
Rule Bill, and to foresee a National Conference as 
the best means of conciliating the interests of the 
two races thirty -one years before the Land 
Conference at whose hands the English Parliament 
accepted (though with some unlucky reserves) a 
revolutionary resettlement of the land of Ireland. 
The " Policy of Conciliation " was my first dream, 
as it is my last aim, in public life. 

The principal reason, however, for which the 
letter to the Daily News is here cited, is to show 
how fundamentally three English Judges, after more 
than a year's conscientious study of the evidence, 
misunderstood the Irishmen they were dealing with. 
The thirty years since 1870, which might have 
already knit the two countries together in the bonds 
of a happy wedlock, have been consumed in a 
Thirty Years' War between the two races. If the 
Irish nation, at the end as at the beginning, "is in 
the balance between an Independent Union with 
England or an Independent Republic without her," 
it is not, as The Three Judges suggested, through 
any incorrigible National conspiracy on our part to 
remain irreconcilable, but through the masterful 
English determination to reject the wisdom in 
relation to Ireland which even Irish schoolboys can 
teach them, and to drive generation after generation 



MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 97 

of friendly Irishmen to the conclusion that England's 
attention is not to be won by words of peace, but 
by the clang of the revolutionary "chapel-bell." 

Mr. J. F. X. O'Brien's case furnishes us with an 
admirable exemplification of how Irishmen regard 
these matters. He was one of the political prisoners 
released from penal servitude shortly before my 
letter to the Daily News was written. My first 
sight of him was at a public banquet in his honour. 
Except that he sat upright, he might have been a 
corpse assisting at his own "wake." His bones 
were barely covered with the tightly -stretched 
skin of a skeleton that had long lain bleaching on 
the desert sands. His eyes had the unearthly 
Dantesque hollowness of " the man who has been in 
hell." He had never felt a repentant pang for all 
he had risked and suffered. He had come out of 
penal servitude precisely as he would have stood 
upon the gallows if the extreme sentence had been 
carried out — happy in the deep tranquillity of an 
unchangeable faith. But, far from indulging any 
grudge of his own against England, he was ready 
to sacrifice as much thenceforth for peace as he had 
sacrificed for war. When Butt's Federal movement 
promised to unite Irish classes, and creeds, in paving 
the way for a friendly compromise with England, 
he displayed even more moral courage in insisting 
upon a fair field for the new movement, and putting 
down the clamour of fanatical physical-force men, 
than he had done under the bullets of the policemen 



H 



98 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

or before the black cap of Judge Keogh. I had the 
privilege of standing by his side one day in the 
Cork Park, when three-fourths of the young hot- 
heads of the city " Circles " broke into revolt and 
attempted by main force to storm the platform of a 
Home Rule meeting. He held the platform, and 
put the hot-heads firmly down. 

But here comes in the seeming inconsistency 
which puzzled The Three Judges in the character of 
Irish public men, but which is in reality the key to 
the deepest truth in Irish affairs ; for while Mr. 
J. F. X. O'Brien was risking his popularity with the 
more violent spirits in his own ranks by forcing 
them to give fair- play to a constitutional public 
movement for a friendly compromise with England, 
he was at the same time so convinced of the 
impossibility of arresting England's attention by 
conciliatory appeals alone, that he all the time 
persisted calmly in his preparations for the ultima 
ratio of armed rebellion. Fresh from the Malebolge 
of penal servitude, he risked liberty and home and 
a station of honour and comfort again to import 
arms and reform the shattered "Circles" in the 
belief that the presence in the background of 
determined men, hungering for peace, but prepared 
for any extent of self-immolation, was the best 
guarantee both for the purity of a Parliamentary 
movement and for the possibility of getting 
England to give any heed to their demands. His 
attitude of " Friends, if you will ; Rebels, if we 



MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 99 

must " was that adopted by almost all the men who 
had been the most formidable in the fighting days 
of Fenianism, and the most heroic in bearing the 
penalties. In after years, "the Fenian men" 
became the pivot men of Parnell's battalions 
and the most reliable of his Parliamentary lieu- 
tenants. If properly regarded, the adhesion of 
such men to a policy of friendly compromise was a 
consummation worth more to England than one of 
her most victorious battles, or one of her most 
opulent dependencies. It is surely one of the 
strangest freaks of the intellectual cross-purposes 
at which the two races have been playing for ages 
that we who considered it our best credential that 
we spoke for Fenianism in all its intensity and sin- 
cerity, when we bore the olive-branch to England, 
should have heard our Fenian connections de- 
nounced as our most unpardonable crime, for many 
years, in the House of Commons and in the columns 
of the Times, and that The Three Judges should 
solemnly conclude that we " intended to bring about 
the absolute independence of Ireland as a separate 
nation," because we succeeded in bringing the most 
fiery advocates of absolute independence to the 
ways of friendly alliance and conciliation. 

But the days were still distant when Irish 
Nationalists could place even a limited trust either 
in Irish Parliamentary agitators or in English 
statesmen. Mr. Gladstone's Land Act of 1870 was 
a daring feat for a British Prime Minister. Lord 



loo WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Lansdowne resigned, and the Duke of Argyll 
mumbled threats of resignation, rather than have a 
hand in it. It was the first legal recognition of a 
divided ownership between landlord and tenant, 
and, by that fact alone, was the commencement of 
a revolution. But, as a piece of Parliamentary 
workmanship, the Act was a lamentable monument 
of English ineptitude in Irish affairs. It would not 
have been passed at all, only that a group of 
Tipperary peasants fired on an evicting party at 
Ballycohey, and discharged a shower of leaden 
pellets into the evicting landlord's face. Ballycohey 
convinced the most hide-bound English legislators 
that eviction was a very desperate business in the 
eyes of an Irish peasant ; but the best remedy the 
English Parliament could devise was to inflict a 
small pecuniary fine upon the evictor, while leaving 
him at perfect liberty to indemnify himself by 
increasing the rents on the tenant's improvement to 
any figure the helpless tenant or some envious 
neighbour could be got to pay. The consequence 
of this excellently-intended ameliorative legislation 
was that, within a few years after the passing of the 
Act, it was my fortune to visit scores of estates, 
where there was a general revaluation by some 
emissary of the landlord, a merciless raising of rents, 
which were enforced by processes of eviction, and 
in consequence a state of public feeling in which the 
agent found it prudent to wear a bullet-proof shirt 
and to walk about with a loaded rifle. At one period 



VI MY FIRST WORD AND LAST loi 

I had to visit Tipperary so frequently in connection 
with affrays Hke that of Ballycohey, that the old 
waiter at Dobbyn's Hotel used to greet a new visit 
with — "Glory be to God, sir, who's kilt now?" 

The Irish members of the time were, with the 
exception of three or four single-minded and able 
men like Mr. George Henry Moore, Mr. John 
Francis Maguire of Cork, and Sir John Gray, a 
sorry lot. In the witty words of one of them, 
" Those of my colleagues whom you won't hnd 
dishonest, you will find drunk." A few of them 
were willing to play the extreme patriot, in order to 
retain their seats until they could dispose of them 
to the Government Whips for some fifth-rate office. 
The story is told of one among them, a lawyer, 
who responded to a deputation of his Fenian 
constituents complaining of his milk-and-watery 
performances — "Gentlemen, I am quite ready to 
raise the Green Flag on the hillside when you 
please ; but don't you think it would be bad 
strategy to name the day — just yet ? " For the 
Parliamentary agitation represented by such men, 
the young men who risked their lives and liberties 
in the Rising without a pang entertained a mingled 
feeling of ferocity and contempt which it took many 
years of honest moderation to eradicate, and which, 
indeed, would never have been eradicated at all, 
only that those who strove to M^ed the moral-force 
and physical-force elements together for high and 
magnanimous national purposes had to prove their 



I02 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

sincerity by undergoing imprisonment, calumny, and 
death as freely as if they were fighting with arms in 
their hands. 

Sometimes the popular contempt for "constitu- 
tional agitation " took the form of the forcible 
breaking-up of the agitators' public meetings. One 
of these scenes — it was in the Corn Market of 
Limerick — I remember vividly. It was to be a 
Land meeting, and the Amnesty question was 
thrown in to disarm the extremists. Upon the 
morning of the meeting, the Corn Market was 
taken possession of by a couple of thousand stalwart 
young fellows, one battalion of whom was drawn 
up at the entrance gate, and the rest in double 
ranks kept open a passage to a gateway at the 
opposite end of the market. When the Members 
of Parliament and the ecclesiastical dignitaries who 
were to ornament the platform arrived, they were 
taken bodily possession of by the battalion of young 
men at the entrance, forced willy-nilly to march 
on between the double lines of sentinels, and, to 
their speechless indignation, bowed courteously but 
firmly out at the opposite gateway. " The Knight 
of Glynn," as the boys nicknamed Sir John Gray 
(in allusion to the Government Whip to whom he 
was supposed to have owed his title), was, I think, 
never afterwards seen on a public platform. 

On other occasions, it was thought the best way 
of pouring scorn and contempt on the Parliamentary 
patriots and on the Westminster Ichabod to elect 



VI MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 103 

to Parliament somebody whose very name would 
be a short summary of Irish hatred and defiance. 
The first time I visited the magnificent county of 
Tipperary, and made acquaintance with its brawny 
men, was in 1869, when O' Donovan Rossa was, to 
the horror of all Sunday citizens, run for the repre- ' 
sentation of the county. At this time of day, when 
popular feeling can indulge its extremest fancy with 
so little risk, it is difficult to estimate the daring 
of O'Donovan Rossa's nominators, or the open- 
mouthed amazement of the respectable, jog-trot 
Irish, not to say English, politicians. The white 
terror aroused by the Rising, the attack on Chester 
Castle, the Manchester Rescue, and the raid of the 
Irish-American sKi^^ Jacmel, was still at its height, 
and made the ruling powers capable of any arbitrary 
cruelty. For years, popular feeling had not dared 
to speak above its breath, without hearing the 
handcuffs and the keys of a penal cell jingling in 
its ears. O'Donovan Rossa himself, when he was 
nominated for Parliament, was lying under sentence 
of penal servitude for life. For a revolt against the 
prison rules his hands were chained behind his 
back, and for thirty-three days he was obliged to 
lap up his food with his tongue like a dog. The 
canvassing had to be done secretly, by bands of 
men sweeping through the country by night. The 
unknown leaders were so penniless that, by a stroke 
of unscrupulous Tory diplomacy not unusual in 
those days, the funds to pay the sheriff's election 



I04 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

expenses had to be procured from a Tory country 
gentleman, who was doubtless reimbursed from the 
exchequer of the Carlton Club. The rival candi- 
date, Serjeant Heron — a respectable Whig lawyer, 
best remembered by those who have heard the 
chimes at midnight at the mess dinners of the 
Munster Bar — was supported by the priests with all 
their might, and quite took it for granted he had 
bamboozled the simple electorate in the historic 
place -hunting style by wearing a flaming green 
necktie on the hustings in Clonmel. Up to the eve 
of the polling, many believed the candidature of 
the Fenian convict to be a clumsy joke. That the 
sober-sided farmers of rich Tipperary should face 
the anger of their priests, and the terrors of a time 
when even an incautious word was treason, and 
carried its penalties, to side openly with the caged 
and beaten arch-revolutionist, seemed even to myself 
the wildest of infatuations on the part of the grim 
men of stern and smileless faces who sat around 
the midnight council-board at Hogan's Hotel in 
Tipperary town. 

" Will the people come in at all ? " some of the 
gloomier spirits asked, when "the General and his 
flying column " (as the corps of nocturnal canvassers 
v/ere called) compared notes after their final recon- 
naissance the night before the polling. " Will they 
have the courage to come in at all ? " " Oh, ye of 
little faith, the priests will bring them!" was the 
reply of "the General," with a roguish twinkle 



MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 105 

behind his eye-glass. So, indeed, it turned out. 
The farmers, who might have shrunk from coming 
in individually to make an open profession of 
rebellion, were mustered in long processions by the 
priests, under escorts of Lancers, to vote for the 
Whig candidate of the green necktie. They were 
met outside the town by bands of enthusiastic men, 
at whose signal the voters jumped off the cars, and 
with a whoop proceeded to the polling-booth to 
give their votes for O' Donovan Rossa, while the 
procession of empty cars, with their escorts of 
Lancers, were left to make their foolish entry 
through the jeering crowd ; and when the poll 
closed for the Tipperary polling-district, only ten 
votes had been recorded for the Government candi- 
date in the green cravat, while all the rest were 
given for the convict, who was that evening forced 
to consume his supper while his hands were strapped 
behind his back in an English convict station. 

The humorous incidents which to some extent 
relieve the deep tragedy of Irish life were not 
wanting from the Tipperary election. 

Here is my note of a droll episode : — 

June %th. Returned at 2.30 A.M. with the Flying 
Column, after covering the country between Cappawhite 
and Aherlow Glen. While we were at supper, there came 
a tremendous rapping and shouting in the street. It was 

John ,the Chairman of the Town Commissioners, in his 

night-shirt, shouting, "General, General, for the love of God, 
open the door ! The Peelers are searching the house, and 
I had barely time to fly through the stable with the 



io6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

traps ! " The traps were twelve or fourteen rusty rifles, 
which he carried in his arms. How the Peelers did not 
hear the shouting, God knows ; it was enough to wake 
the dead. The Chairman of the Town Commissioners, 
all but stark-naked, and with his armful of rifles, looked 
very funny. He had to swallow tumblers full of whiskey, 
or he would have had his death of cold. 

"The General" was himself one of the oddest 
figures in the Tipperary of those days. Peter 
Gill, both as a journalist and an orator, was 
for many years the principal articulate protector 
of the Tipperary tenantry, a loaded blunderbuss 
being their only other resource when " Pether's " 
eloquence failed. His fearless paper, the Advo- 
cate, was subject to occasional mysterious dis- 
appearances, on which occasions a printed slip 
was circulated among the subscribers : "In conse- 
quence of the absence of the proprietor on import- 
ant political business, the Advocate will not appear 
this evening." The "absence on important political 
business " was sometimes occasioned by his arrest 
for debt, and at other times by the failure to beat 
up sufficient resources to pay "the Staff" Not, 
indeed, that "the Staff" were in the least exacting. 
They mostly lived on the premises with "the 
General," in a queer communist promiscuity of 
goods and victuals. Whenever the larder was 
wholly empty, they put their heads together as to 
how to fill the deficit, and if the paper-merchant was 
inexorable, or the necessary postage-stamps not to 
be had, philosophically adjourned the publication 



MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 107 

until better times. " Pether's " addresses to the 
electors of Tipperary were more than once dated 
from the County jail. His detractors used to hint 
that there was "an unalterable figure" at which his 
election addresses were withdrawn and the opposing 
candidate admitted without a contest. The reproach, 
were it even well founded, would not be too heinous 
in times when Parliamentarianism was the synonym 
of corrupt self-seeking, and when "Pether" might 
well have considered himself as doing a national 
service by keeping the Advocate going at the expense 
of some hypocritical place-hunter. 

" The General's " voice was, however, a more 
potent instrument than his pen. He had an in- 
exhaustable fund of rich natural eloquence, set off 
by a mellow voice, a mouth capable of the drollest 
by-play, a rolling eye, and an eye-glass which he 
at one moment thrust into his mouth and sucked 
as if it were a lollipop, and the next moment fixed 
under his eyebrow arch during his speeches, con- 
vulsing his crowd now with a variety of humorous 
jerks and winks, and again appalling his enemies 
with the glare of a basilisk. When " Pether " got up 
to speak "on behalf of a hundred thousand personal 
friends in Tipperary," his boast was not a serious 
exaggeration. His humour and richness of imagina- 
tion gave him a special distinction among the men 
of Tipperary, whose gifts generally go in the direc- 
tion of straight -ahead action and deadly earnest 
rather than of fiowery speech, and he repaid his 



io8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

admiring county with a passionate admiration of his 
own. "They tell me," I once heard him roll out 
in his mellifluous tones over a Tipperary crowd — 
"they tell me, ' Pether, you are getting on in years ; 
isn't there a nice girl anywhere around in Nenagh 
that would warm the heart of the poor old "Advo- 
cate " ? ' Gentlemen," said " Pether," erecting the 
eye-glass and glancing over the crowd in all his 
majesty, " my bride was Tipperary, and we spent 
the honeymoon on the slopes of Slieve-na-mon." ^ 
His stream of sparkling native eloquence was un- 
failing. Once Mr. George Henry Moore, M.P., 
missed the morning train for a great meeting at 
Thurles, and the next train would not arrive for 
three hours. The General was put up to fill the 
gap, and hour after hour kept the multitude in 
alternate roars of indignation and laughter, as he 
lashed out at some local tyrants with weapons of 
passion and ridicule that never failed. Suddenly a 
priest, with his eye on his watch, called out to him, 
"It's all right, Pether; you may wind up." "Gentle- 
men," pursued the orator, " I have detained you 
too long" (cries of "No, no!"); "you must blame the 
murdering tyrants of Tipperary if in the indigna- 
tion of an honest Irish heart I have had to stand 
so long between you and our illustrious countryman, 
George Henry Moore, whom I know you are dying 
to lay your eyes upon." There was a great shout 

1 A beautiful mountain in the south of the county, made famous 
by a " monster meeting " at which " Pether " was a conspicuous figure. 



MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 109 

from his enraptured audience. " Go on, Pether, go on 
— there isn't a better man of them all than yourself." 

" Mick," said the General, fixing his eye-glass on 
a man in the crowd who had spoken, "that's as big a 
fib as I could tell myself And now, fellow-country- 
men," he proceeded, the drollery of the situation 
completely overcoming him, " will I tell you a bit 
of a secret ? 'Tisn't to Mick Carroll nor you I've 
been talking these last two hours and a half, but 
running a race with a railway train ; and by the 
same token," he cried, as a railway whistle sounded 
close at hand, " here comes the train and George 
Henry Moore in it ! Would you ask for a finer 
peroration, if 'twas Edmund Burke himself that was 
addressing you ? " 

If it was deeper men than the General who 
were the real driving force in affairs like the Rossa 
election — men who, whenever there was not a 
crowd to be entertained, dismissed the General with 
a curl of the lip as a mountebank and buffoon — his 
roguish eye and rollicking eloquence offered, at 
least, some relief to the gloom of a struggle so 
constantly beset with disappoinment and suffering, 
and constituted a peculiarly Irish element of geniality 
for which one might search in vain in the Revolu- 
tions of any other race. 

Similar incidents marked the election of Mr. 
John Mitchel for the same constituency a few years 
afterwards. The Mitchel election is principally 
memorable to myself because — ( i) it marked my first 



no WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

(and last) meeting with that great Irishman himself; 
(2) it first made me acquainted with Mr, John 
Dillon ; and (3) it was the occasion of my first 
public speech, or speechlet. My first glimpse of 
Mr. John Dillon, with whom I was destined to be 
associated for many eventful years, was at an election 
meeting in Roscrea, at which the Mitchel campaign 
began. His great height looked all the vaster for 
his thin and wasted limbs, upon which the languor 
of death seemed to be fastening. His soft, dark 
eyes, slowly waking up to a perception of the persons 
introduced to him, and the things they said, some- 
how gave me the impression that they had already 
gone far on the road to unconsciousness, and found 
some difficulty in returning to life from behind the 
heavy eyelids. His white and still face on a back- 
ground of black hair of singular intensity might well 
indeed have seemed to be a face in a black coffin, 
if it were not for a tinge of rich Spanish colour 
about the handsome features, and the light of vivid 
Apostolic passion that flamed in his eyes, once they 
were kindled to their work. It was, I think, one 
of the young medical student's first public speeches, 
and made up by its earnest ring for the difficulty 
which he found in sustaining his voice or even his 
limbs during its delivery. 

My own first words in public were spoken a few 
nights after in Cashel. My only part in the 
campaign was that of a newspaper man ; but there 
being no speaker available except Mr. C. G. Doran 



VI MY FIRST WORD AND LAST iii 

(a builder and engineer who, throughout the 
Mitchel campaign, and throughout his self-sacrificing 
life, has been one of the foundation-stones of Irish 
National resistance, all the more powerful, like the 
foundation-stones, for being buried out of sight), he 
besought me to come to the rescue and dragged me 
to the window. I said very little — I don't in the 
least know what ; but, whether it was the darkness, 
the wild Tipperary whoop of the crowd, or mere 
desperation that nerved me, I felt a rush of hot 
words blowing like a tropic wind across my brain, 
and when the hot blast was over, I heard the crowd 
crying out for me again, but with some difficulty, as 
they did not even know my name. My facility of 
speech was only an accident, and a momentary one, 
however. The next day, Mr. Doran, inspirited by 
my little success in Cashel, dragged me to the front 
again at Fethard. But this time there was no 
friendly darkness. The eyes of the crowd flashed 
on me with the devouring terror of a den of lions : 
merely to hear my name announced, covered my 
face with crimson, and paralysed my tongue and 
brain, and — I was not heard in public again during 
the Mitchel campaign, nor for many a year after. 

Mitchel was returned for Tipperary in his absence 
in the United States, and even if, after the oblivious 
antidote of a quarter of a century, the Government 
had not meanly recollected he was an unpardoned 
political prisoner, in order to disqualify him for a 
seat in Parliament, it is certain he would never have 



112 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

presented himself at Westminster, except to deliver 
some message of defiance, fulgurant as the magnifi- 
cent prose cannonade with which he had shaken 
the towers of Dublin Castle to their base in '48. 
The people who sent him to the House of Parliament, 
indeed, demanded nothing better of their repre- 
sentative than that he should go there to break its 
"windows — if he could do it no more serious structural 
damage. Whatever was the design with which 
Mitchel returned to Ireland from his long exile, he 
really came back to die. When I saw him on the 
Atlantic liner in the Cove of Cork, from which he 
had sailed away twenty-six years before in a convict 
ship, there was little of him except his indomitable 
will alive. When there was question of his writing 
an address of thanks to the electors of Tipperary 
he was gasping for breath, and whispered — " Let 
one of you boys scribble something." I had the 
privilege of scribbling the "something" myself, and 
did so with the ecstatic reverence of a young Levite 
admitted behind the Veil. " Yes," said Mitchel, 
with a smile, " that will fill the bill. They would 
have transported you for it in my day." 

But, feeble though he was, he would see the rich 
plains of Tipperary for himself, and its gallant men. 
The evening of his arrival at the Limerick Junction 
there was a scene of volcanic enthusiasm more like 
the outburst of a Revolution than the sequel of a 
Parliamentary election. In the excitement, the 
crowd first seized upon the wrong man. An old 



VI MY FIRST WORD AND LAST 113 

gentleman unknown was taken hold of arms and 
legs by the sons of Anak of a district pre-eminent 
for physical manhood, and hoisted on their shoulders, 
and grasped by both hands in iron grips until he 
roared for agony. When the mistake was discovered, 
the unfortunate stranger paid for his fugitive fame 
by being dropped half-dead on the platform as un- 
ceremoniously as he had been caught up. Let the 
reader judge what was Mitchel's fate in the hug of 
those adoring bears within the next few days of 
speeches, torchlight processions, and general tearing 
of limb from limb. 

Mitchel was undoubtedly, if ever man was, 
killed by the kindness of Tipperary ; but it was the 
death of all others he would have coveted. It was 
a magnificent vindication by another generation of 
men of the Cause to which he had immolated his 
youth and his fine talents with the stoicism of an 
old Roman. He, so to say, died on the old battle- 
field, which was not yet lost ; and he did not in the 
least object if the event was hastened by the wild 
cheers and the hot blood of Tipperary. A week 
after the Tipperary visit he was dead in his father's 
house in Newry. Among those who stood by his 
open grave at the funeral was his brother-in-law, 
Mr. John Martin of Loughorne, who was the be- 
loved Patroclus of his days of combat, and was not 
to be separated from him in death. Martin, with 
the gentleness of a saint, had a soul as incapable of 
knowing fear as Mitchel's own. He deliberately 



114 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, vi 

put his hand into the fire of England's wrath in 
which he had seen Mitchel's burn away before him 
in the seismic days of '48. As he followed him to 
transportation in Tasmania, so he followed him on 
the last great journey. Standing bareheaded over 
his friend's coffin in the Newry graveyard, Martin 
caught a cold from which he died, and, little more 
than a week after, another grave was opened to 
receive Mitchel's old comrade in arms. "In death 
they were not divided." 




cJo c3K-jx:_^ i^t-iJo^ 



S-m&rif ^XUalkjtr &A.. <Sic 



CHAPTER VII 

PHYSICAL FORCE AND MORAL FORCE 
1870-1874 

The hopes of a friendly treaty between the two 
countries adumbrated in the letter to the Daily 
News were not destined to an early fulfilment. For 
a number of years I was cured of any desire to 
meddle in public affairs by my own experiences of 
the futility of secret conspiracy, of the insincerity of 
Parliamentary agitation, as it was then conducted, 
and the total insensibility of England to the Irish 
situation the moment the Fenian danger ceased to 
be formidable. 

The Three Judges of the Parnell Commission 
appeared to be a little startled that I volunteered 
with some pride the story of my own brief period 
of authority in the Revolutionary Brotherhood, It 
is, however, as I told them, one of my fondest 
recollections. As commonly happens after a great 
failure, the organisation had fallen into a sad state of 
dilapidation and mutual recriminations, and it was 
pressed upon me that, as a stranger to their quarrels, 

"5 



ii6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

and as one whose young enthusiasms had not yet 
been quenched by disappointments, I might be able 
to exercise a useful influence in healing their differ- 
ences and reviving their hopes. I was accordingly 
elected Secretary for the Province of Munster, and 
in that capacity was the medium of communica- 
tion between the mysterious Supreme Council and 
the provincial County Centres. Two conclusions 
impressed themselves upon me more firmly every 
day of the two years during which the appointment 
lasted ; the first being one of admiration and 
affection for the bulk of the men with whom I was 
brought in contact, and the other the almost ludicrous 
inadequacy of the means towards the end, and of 
the results when compared with the perils incurred. 
It is quite true that, by the time I came to know 
the inward history of the movement, its first energies 
had been drained to the lees. Elsewhere ^ I have 
described the perilous system by which my brother 
had been in the habit of importing arms into Cork 
by the Newport steamer, and the thoroughgoing 
fright I received myself one night when I insisted 
on accompanying him in one of his hairbreadth 
adventures. By one of the strange coincidences of 
Irish life, when Mr. Michael Davitt read the article 
in the Contemporary, he remarked, "Why, I didn't 
know your brother, but it was I who was despatching 
from London by the Newport boat the rifles that 
you describe your brother as running the blockade 

1 In the Contemporary Review for May 1897. 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 117 

in disembarking at Cork." Mr. Davitt was seized 
at last on the Paddington platform with a consign- 
ment of the contraband arms, and went through 
nine years of penal servitude for his share of the 
adventure. 

My brother, though he bore a charmed life, in his 
innumerable comings and goings to the well-guarded 
Newport boat, received during those midnight 
hardships the seeds of the disease that killed him 
as truly as if a bullet from the police-guard on board 
the boat had pierced his heart. And the handfuls 
of rifles for which these awful perils were run week 
by week ? The half of them, purchased at such an 
expense of liberty and life, were from time to time 
discovered to the police by some indigent traitor, 
and the rest grew rusty and rotten, and brought 
no danger to anybody except those who stored 
them. 

My own experiences were of a time when the pros- 
pects were still more dreary and when the mora/ 
of the organisation had reached its lowest ebb. 
Sometimes there would be a gallant rally of the 
county " Centres " to make a fresh start ; but before 
the meeting was half an hour in progress we were 
discussing not how the Irish Republic was to be 
brought about, but what had become of 12s. 6d. 
forwarded from Ballydehob five years before, for the 
purchase of warlike munitions, or where had this 
or that gentleman in the company been the night of 
the Rising ? One anecdote will serve to show how 



ii8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

little mystery our proceedings had for the police. 
The head of the Detective Department once said to 
me, " Excuse me for saying so, Mr. O'Brien, but 
all the men in the barracks are wondering what in 
the world has come over you that you should put 
yourself in the power of some of the people you are 
associating with. There are fellows among them 
that would sell you to us for a bottle of whiskey." 

"I don't suppose," I said, "you expect me to 
make any reply to an observation of that sort .-* " 

" Indeed I don't," he said, " but it's the talk of all 
the men in the barracks, what a pity 'tis." 

The gravity of the warning was brought home 
to me at last by an experience which can now be 
related without injury to any living person, and 
which was to me the crowning demonstration of the 
evils of secret conspiracy in Ireland. We had entered 
with high hopes upon a new project for attracting 
young men of a thoughtful turn to our ranks by 
founding a Literary Club, which was to be carried 
on openly both as a protection and a recruiting 
ground for the secret organisation, and to which 
some of us looked as a means of elevating and 
broadening our conspirators' conception of patriotic 
duty. Our plans were discussed at a remarkable 
gathering of the leaders, old and young, in a Cork 
hotel, and a special enthusiasm for the project was 
displayed by a man in a seemingly prosperous com- 
mercial position, who had for some time withdrawn 
from active participation in the movement, but now 



vii PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 119 

assumed a foremost position with all his old dash. 
We separated in the highest spirits, confident that 
at last a soul was beginning to stir under the dry- 
bones. Next day Cork was startled by the news of 
a highway robbery in broad day, within a few yards 
of one of the principal streets of the city. A 
messenger carrying ;^8oo in gold from one of the 
breweries to a Bank was stopped in Post Office 
Lane by two men who clapped revolvers to his head 
and disappeared with the treasure. Having ascer- 
tained the facts and written off a lurid description of 
the occurrence for the evening paper, my thoughts 
turned a thousand miles away from the highway 
robbery to our arrangements of the previous night 
for setting the Literary Club on its feet without delay. 
I accordingly despatched by our office messenger, 
to the man who had volunteered to be the principal 
officer of the Club, a note written in lead-pencil in 
pretty much the following words : — 

"Herald" Office, 4 o'c. 

My dear M. — As you may judge, I am anxious to 
have the arrangements made last night completed as 
quickly as possible. I beg you will drop in on me at the 
Herald Office at half-past seven to-night without fail. 
Yours sincerely. 

I asked the messenger, on his return, had he 
received any reply. "No, sir," he said; "he 
looked very queer, as if he had taken drink. He 
didn't seem to know what he was doing, and 
crumpled the letter up in his pocket." 



I20 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Two hours afterwards I learned that M. had been 
arrested for the Post Office Lane highway robbery, 
and my mysterious letter of appointment doubtless 
found in his pocket ! 

It was bad enough, every night I laid my head 
on my pillow for two years to have been liable to 
penal servitude, if the Government had thought us 
dangerous enough to stretch out its hand, but here 
was a development the horror of which no pen could 
picture. Needless to say, the secret movement was 
as free from stain in the transaction as was the 
English nation from the private guilt of Lord 
Castlereagh. It was the plot of not more than half 
a dozen bankrupt and desperate men, who sought to 
make a parade of their connection with the revolu- 
tionary movement in order to spread the impression 
that the robbery was undertaken to replenish the 
Fenian funds, and thus cast some glamour of popular 
sympathy around their crime. In this design they 
wholly failed, thanks to the stern measures of the 
revolutionary leaders themselves. The Supreme 
Council issued a secret circular expressing their 
abhorrence of the crime and proclaiming no quarter 
for the miscreants who committed it. Before the 
trial, the criminals' few sympathisers made desperate 
attempts to terrorise those who had issued the 
circular. I myself received an anonymous letter 
warning me not to walk alone on the Lee Road by 
night, as I was in the habit of doing. As in the 
case of the very large number of threatening letters 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 121 

I have received during my life, the warning was not 
worth the dirty sheet of notepaper used in writing 
it. I continued to walk on the Lee Road alone, and 
nothing came of it. M. and his accomplice were 
duly convicted and sentenced to penal servitude. 
Nevertheless, guiltless as was the secret movement, 
and capable as the movement even in its then stage 
of enfeeblement proved itself to be to repel even the 
suspicion of complicity, it was only a secret move- 
ment which could have exposed men to the appalling 
danger, worse than any wound of bullet or dagger, 
I ran the night my letter of appointment was found 
in M.'s pocket. Knowing all that I now know of 
the attempts to make Parnell responsible for the 
deeds of murder clubs of whose very existence he 
was ignorant, and knowing the diabolical contrivances 
for the manufacture of crime which have since been 
brought home to the agents of Dublin Castle, the 
mind refuses to speculate what might have been the 
result if my mysterious letter and the fact of our 
meeting with the malefactors the previous night had 
been manipulated by police officers of the stamp 
of County -Inspector James Ellis French and 
Sergeant Sheridan, and by Crown Solicitors of the 
stamp of Mr. George Bolton, reinforced by the in- 
ventions of a Richard Pigott, and passed upon by a 
packed jury directed by any one of three or four 
Irish Judges whose names it would be painful to 
recall from a merciful oblivion. In a life fairly full 
of dangers in almost every shape, there is none 



122 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

other which comes back upon my memory with such 
an overwhelming sense of horror as the risk then 
run for results so ludicrously inadequate. 

The incident, while it completed my conviction 
as to the folly and deeply embedded evils of secret 
conspiracy as a means of freeing Ireland, did not for 
a moment shake my admiration of the Fenian men. 
Four-fifths of the best men of the Parnell movement 
were those who had received their first lessons of 
determination and unselfishness in the hard school 
of Fenianism. I have heard Parnell himself say, 
" The only foolish thing the Fenians ever did was 
the Rising." Under the apparent irony of the say- 
ing there is and was meant to be a deep compliment 
to the other than military virtues and achievements of 
the movement. There can be no harm in relating 
now, that the first time I saw Matt Harris — whom, as 
member for Galway in after years, you approached 
if you wanted to know the mind of the province of 
Connaught as inevitably as you crossed the Shannon 
Bridge in order to gain access to the Connaught 
plains — he was presiding over a Secret Congress or 
Parliament of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 
the City Mansion Hotel in Dublin, not a rifleshot 
from Dublin Castle. An impressive Speaker he 
made. He had a broad, judicial gravity which 
wanted no wig to complete its dignity, and a gift of 
rich native inspiration which wrung from the ranks 
of Tuscany — from one of the Times counsel at the 
Parnell Commission, Sir Henry James — a cry of 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 123 

admiration for the very speech he was denouncing. 
And solemn was the reflection that every man sat in 
that assembly with a sentence of penal servitude 
suspended over his head, and that every man's 
liberty, if not life, hung on his colleagues' fidelity. 
It was perhaps why this, my first Parliament, im- 
pressed me with more respect than subsequent ones 
on a more splendid theatre. 

Another of my colleagues in the Republican 
Parliament, and in many another risky adventure of 
those and after years, was the present member for 
South Meath, Mr. David Sheehy. His father had 
become the owner of the mill in Arthur's Glen, in 
Mallow, where I had once come upon "the boys" 
going through the manual drill and casting bullets ; 
and during the thirty-three years of my association 
with Sheehy, since the days when his blonde beard 
was the admiration of the "young Zean maids," I 
have never known him to be missing in an hour of 
danger, and never seen a sign of quailing in his eye. 
It was in the stirring times of the O' Donovan Rossa 
Election I first came across Tom Condon, the 
present member for East Tipperary. He was then 
a magnificent type of Tipperary manhood — tall 
and massively-built as a Guardsman — an excellent 
specimen of the " Flying Column," before whose 
onset poor Serjeant Heron's green cravat and his 
Whig retinue went ingloriously down. It was many 
years later, however, as will be seen hereafter, before 
I came to learn that his solid good sense and power 



124 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

of communicatin<J: to masses of men his own modera- 
tion, as well as his own fearlessness, were even more 
remarkable than his fine physique or his charm as a 
vocalist in convivial hours. Another of the Fenian 
men, to whom I am indebted for a friend and 
Ireland for one of her most sterling soldiers, is 
Mr. Gilhooly, the member for West Cork. It is 
characteristic of Gladstone's fine human instinct 
that he should have, on several occasions, picked 
out for special notice, and even for confidential con- 
sultation in the lobby, a quiet, unimposing-looking 
little man, as to whose existence the mind of the 
average English Member of Parliament would 
present an absolute blank. Gladstone was right in 
divining that he had, in the modest little Bantry 
draper, an authentic type of the incorruptibility and 
indestructibility of the Irish cause. Gilhooly was 
one of the " County Centres " who were obliged to 
furnish me with periodical reports of their arma- 
ments, and I remember well that Bantry, with its 
thirty rifles and twelve revolvers — clean and bright 
under Gilhooly's vigilant eye — outstripped the record 
of every town in the province, outside Cork and 
Limerick cities ; as for many a year since, when the 
word went out to turn to more hopeful weapons, the 
Bantry of Jim Gilhooly has continued to maintain 
an honourable and foremost place in the firing line. 
For obvious reasons, I do not feel myself at liberty 
to particularise further ; but enough has been, 
perhaps, said to show why even the hideous perils 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 125 

of my last occult experiences have not dimmed my 
abiding belief that the constitutional movement is 
indebted, for the cream of its men and the best of 
its practical achievements, to the courage, self-denial, 
and, if you will, glorious madness of the Fenian 
spirit. The Englishman who confines his view to 
the merely military ways and means or the material 
results will, no doubt, dismiss the Fenian history of 
abortive rebellion, hangings, and penal servitude 
with Dryden's contemptuous epitaph : 

To die for Party is a common evil. 

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. 

Moore had a better knowledge of his country- 
men when, thinking all the time of the comrades of 
his own young college days, he describes the point 
of view of the Fire- worshippers of Iran : — 

Who, though they know the strife is vain — 
Who, though they know the riven chain 
Snaps but to enter in the heart 
Of him who rends its Hnks apart — 
Yet dare the issue, blest to be 
Even for one bleeding moment free, 
And die in pangs of Liberty ! 

If the Fenian fire -worshippers had not been 
willing to throw themselves into the flame witli 
Hafed, Irish Catholics might still be paying a tithe 
of their substance for the support of an alien Church, 
the Irish tenants, whom the law is now inviting to 
become a nation of freeholders, would still be a herd 
of charterless slaves, and England would never have 



126 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

suspected that Irish Members of Parliament came to 
Westminster on any more serious business than 
that of place-begging. 

The deductions I drew from my own study of 
revolutionary methods in Ireland were briefly 
these : 

1. The attraction of a Secret Society for the 

Irish mind is due to the inborn Gaelic love 
of mystery, to the habit, derived from the 
history of the country for several centuries, 
of thinking that all good work for a banned 
faith and country must be done in secret, and 
to that generous and adventurous passion 
which, failing the chance of an immediate 
armed fight, at least prefers the risks and 
excitement of preparing for it to the tamer 
work of speechifying or listening to speeches. 

2. The moral influence of the Secret Society is 

wholly bad. A life of conflict with the 
Church demoralises all except the most 
stoical. A professional traitor is always one 
of its most active spirits, and sometimes its 
principal organiser. In the nature of things 
a Secret Society, especially in its declining 
stages, offers no test of the capacity of leaders, 
discourages finer minds, and ends by giving 
the upper hand to the intriguers, the in- 
capables, or the base. 

3. From the military point of view the results 

are ridiculously disproportioned to the risks. 



vn PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 127 

Any one who has had practical experience 
of the difficulty of importing arms into Ireland 
in any considerable quantity will confess the 
absurdity of hoping to arm and give a military 
training to a country by such methods. In a 
small and talkative country, the best men in 
a conspiracy inevitably get known, and can 
be swept into the Government net any night 
it pleases, thus stripping the organisation of 
the flower of its fighting men before the hour 
for action, and dooming them to the revolt- 
ing servitude of a convict prison, instead of 
giving them at least the compensations of 
the hero's death on a battlefield, 

4. So far as Ireland can be a formidable military 

danger to England at all under present con- 
ditions, it is not by means of a secret con- 
spiracy dragging along in semi-animation for 
years, but by means of a foreign landing follow- 
ing a defeat of the English fleet, after which, 
no doubt, so long as the craving for National 
Self-Government remains unsatisfied, almost 
the entire able-bodied population would be 
at the trumpet-call of the invaders. 

5. For the above reasons, the overpowering 

majority of the bravest and most thoughtful 
men, who staked their all under the Fenian 
flag, while it still represented a serious call 
to armed rebellion, made up their minds that 
secret conspiracy, as the only mode of free- 



128 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

ing Ireland, was morally deleterious as to its 
means and hopelessly ineffectual for its 
purpose, and that a serious and tolerant 
attention should be given to any more 
practicable proposal for composing the quarrel 
between the two countries. 
6. Nevertheless, those who toiled with most 
sincerity in the ways of peace and concilia- 
tion remained unshaken in the conviction 
that in the unselfishness and courage, even 
in the seeming folly, of the Fenianism of its 
best days lay the surest strength and central 
heat of Irish patriotism, and in all the develop- 
ments of the new National Policy of Concilia- 
tion, illustrated by the readiness for new 
trials by fire, they never cast back a regretful 
thought upon their own early war -dreams, 
nor attempted to decry those who still 
doubted that England was to be reasoned 
with by any less desperate arguments. They 
never sought to circumscribe the liberty of 
opinion of future generations. 
Nee sat rationis in armis. That was the upshot 
of my conclusions as to secret conspiracy. But 
Parliamentary agitation, as it was practised then 
and for years to come, was still more disappointing. 
The insignificant visible results of Isaac Butt's 
Federal movement, and the successes of the more 
vigorous young men whom his downfall brought to 
the front, have hitherto prevented justice from 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 129 

being done to a man of genius and to a conception 
of National Policy of singular elevation and breadth 
of view. Butt made the discovery years before the 
advent of Parnell that the secret of a sound National 
movement was the physical-force spirit working by 
moral- force methods. O'Connell, in his declining 
days, rejected the combination when presented to 
him by Davis, and in doing so destroyed the chances 
both of a moral -force and of a physical -force 
programme. O'Connell also failed to realise that 
the Land question was the deepest concern of 
practical life in Ireland. So did the young Irelanders 
until Fintan Lalor and Mitchel preached it when 
too late. Butt felt to the quick all the evils of 
Irish landlordism. With an acute understanding of 
the Land question, and a statesman's grasp of the 
remedies, his soul was at the same time pene- 
trated with Grattan's and Davis's sublime ambition 
of combining all classes and creeds in a perfectly 
self-centred, self-inspired, but genial and unaggressive 
Irish patriotism. But all the omens were against 
him. He raised his flag while the country was sick 
with the lassitude of the Fenian failure, and before 
any except the most far-sighted of the revolutionary 
leaders could be got to tolerate what they regarded 
as a Parliamentary imposture. They respected 
Butt ; only the utmost service they could be in- 
duced to do him was to leave him alone. 

Parnell arrived at a time when, with the help of 
Mr. Michael Davitt and Mr. John Devoy, the full 

K 



I30 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

strength of the revolutionary forces was at his call. 
In the years when Butt's movement was striving to 
establish itself, agricultural prosperity in Ireland was 
at its height and the farmers were proportionately 
lethargic. In 1875 the curve of agricultural prices 
reached its topmost. Parnell and the Land League 
found a country the half of which was stricken with 
famine, and the most thriving of whose counties was 
lashed to agitation by the encroachments of foreign 
competition. Butt, indeed, rallied a considerable 
body of the Irish gentry to the first gentle love- 
feasts of the Home Rule movement (a felicitous 
name- programme which it was his good fortune 
to hit upon). The Irish gentry had not at that 
time, however, any solid ground of interest, such as 
the abolition of Landlordism on opulent and popular 
terms offered them under the Act of 1903 supplies, 
for allying their future fortunes with the people's. 
They enrolled themselves in a platonic way as Home 
Rulers, largely through spite against Gladstone for 
disestablishing their Church. Their only active co- 
operation with Butt was to do him the disservice 
of joining his Parliamentary Party and helping to 
weaken and disintegrate it. Parnell, on the contrary, 
had the simpler and more popular task of un- 
ceremoniously fighting the Irish gentry under 
circumstances in which their vices, their cruel and 
stupid exactions, their incapacity to serve either 
their own enlightened interests or their country, 
made it easy to inflame against them the interests 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 131 

and the passions of a young democracy, now for the 
first time aroused to a knowledge of their rights 
and of their power. 

Butt was in one sense too late, because too old. 
He came, in another sense, too soon. Above all, 
this most delightful but ill-starred Irishman had 
a past. It was true of him, as of the hero of 
Corneille's tragedy, that " one half of his life put 
the other half in the tomb." The errors of his 
young days will always be gently judged in Ireland, 
for they were largely due to that fondness for good 
fellowship and improvident generosity which causes 
the countrymen of Goldsmith to take a greater pride 
in the poet's pension to the landlady of his garret in 
Green Arbour Court in his ragged and starving 
days than in his monument in Westminster Abbey. 

Butt's early career in Parliament fell upon days 
when wine-bibbing and gaming and a reckless con- 
tempt for money were not reckoned a reproach, if 
they were not indeed reckoned a mark of breeding, 
in a gentleman. As the O'Gorman Mahon, who 
" heard the chimes at midnight " himself in many a 
frolic of the gods, once remarked to me, "Old Sir 
D. was nearly always very drunk when I carried 
him home from the House, but he was drunk like a 
gentleman, and by G — ^ there wasn't a policeman 
in London wouldn't know the difference and lend 
me a hand." The young bloods of Butt's first 

^ For the gentlemen of the O'Gorman Mahon school, oaths were 
as pretty an accomplishment as pistol-shooting — and less harmful 



132 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Parliament were not above having a pugilistic bout 
with a cabman, on condition of afterwards throwing 
a sovereign to him to cure his bruises. They would 
stoop to any humiliation to discount a bill with some 
villainous money-lender, and straightway hand over 
half the proceeds to some poor wretch more dis- 
tressed than themselves. In the wantonness of his 
magnificent powers, he would go down " special " to 
the Cork Assizes in some great cause, and, after 
enthralling the Court with his eloquence and subtlety 
all day, would spend the entire night at the card- 
table, plunge into a bath in the morning, and, without 
a wink of sleep, return to Court and get through the 
new day with undiminished intellectual lustre. Had 
he clung to his profession, he would have been the 
unquestioned dva^ avhpSiv, even of a breed of lawyers 
of the true heroic stature, like Whiteside, Armstrong, 
and O'Hagan. Had he thrown himself with all his 
might into the Parliamentary arena, as the brilliant 
young Tory swordsman who was put up to face 
O'Connell, or as the Irish Nationalist leader of 
noble and high-sighted range — which O'Connell 
had the acumen to predict he would yet be — I am 
certain no Parliament man of our day, with the 
exception of Gladstone and Disraeli, would be now 
mentioned in the same companionship. 

Even in his latter years, when his career, both at 
the Bar and in Parliament, had been sadly bruised 
by disappointments, he had only to appear in the 
hall of the Four Courts, and a flight of attorneys 



v,i PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 133 

immediately swooped down upon him with briefs. 
So, unhappily, would Nemesis swoop down upon 
him with equal celerity. Outside the laughing 
group of admiring brothers of the Bar and pros- 
perous attorneys that would gather around him as 
he placed his back to one of the statues in the hall 
and warmed them with his sunny smile and his 
caressing friendliness, you would see the figure of 
a dun or a greasy -looking bill-discounter darkly 
hovering, and presently you might see the unlucky 
man of genius glide away from the admiring circle 
and slip his arm under that of his creepy creditor 
and walk off with him, chatting and comparing notes 
as though they were a pair of Parliamentary col- 
leagues, deep in some weighty concern of State. 

When he went down to contest Limerick City, 
as the leader of the new Home Rule Party, word 
got abroad that a bankruptcy messenger had also 
arrived to arrest him for debt. The enthusiastic 
meeting awaiting him in the theatre had only to 
be informed that "circumstances over which he had 
no control " prevented him from being with them. 
The impish humour that always attends Irish 
tragedies followed him in his flight to Killaloe, a 
town some eighteen miles away in the county of 
Clare. Despite all his precautions as to secrecy, 
the news reached the boys of Killaloe that the 
distinguished Irishman had arrived in their midst. 
Presently there were heard the strains of a band, 
and torchlights flared up in the darkness, and the 



134 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

roadway outside the hotel was alive with a cheering 
crowd. The unfortunate gentleman had to listen, 
twirling his glasses nervously in his fingers, as was 
his wont, while an address was read to him, welcom- 
ing him to the old capital of King Brian Boroimhe 
(the ruins of whose palace of Kinkora are close 
at hand), and assuring him that that famous monarch 
himself did not command a truer allegiance from 
the men of Killaloe than their illustrious visitor. 
He had barely time to stammer a few sentences of 
excruciating gratitude for their kindness, and to 
slip away through the backyard of the hotel, when 
the Court Messenger, who had pursued him from 
Limerick, arrived to find the band and the torch- 
lights still in their glory, but his quarry flown.^ 

Butt grounded all the hopes of his movement 
upon the co-operation, or at least the benevolent 
neutrality, of the Irish Republican Brotherhood 

^ Mr. Henry O'Shea, who was the moving spirit of the Butt 
Election Committee, writes me that Butt's faithful conducting agent, 
Mr. John Ellard, was afraid to let even the Committee know the 
secret of the sudden disappearance of the candidate. They held 
torchlight processions night after night, while their absent chief was 
flying from one country-house to another from his pursuers. " The 
day of nomination arrived, and I then first learned the whereabouts 
of our candidate from a young friend of Butt's, named Charles 
Conway, who went with him. He told me they had quite a series 
of exploits in escaping from the bailiffs, who were hot on the scent, 
and I heard they covered nearly the same route that was followed by 
Sarsfield in his celebrated night raid on King William's siege train." 
Mr. O'Shea adds another tragic touch. " I presume you know Butt 
was arrested for debt at the time of his second Limerick election, 
I know all the circumstances, for I was up with him in Eccles Street, 
and I found him with two bailiffs sitting outside his dining-room 
door in the hall." What a picture of the Irish leader in the throes 
of a General Election ! 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 135 

(which was the official title of the Fenian organisa- 
tion). In this he anticipated the Land League, 
although with less fortunate results. His most 
potent source of influence with " the extreme men " 
was his right trusty friend John Nolan, a Dublin 
commercial traveller, still remembered as ' 'Amnesty " 
Nolan, because he was the soul and strong right arm 
of the great Amnesty campaign of 1868-69. Nolan 
had a more extraordinary command over a multitude 
than any other man I ever knew. In a procession a 
hundred thousand strong he had only to pass the 
signal, and bands, banners, and innumerable trade- 
bodies obeyed him as the waves obeyed the nod of 
Neptune. His Napoleonic power over the scores 
of National bands in Dublin (a sufficiently touchy 
tribe) gave rise to the story that, whenever some 
great popular manifestation was in contemplation, 
his order of the day was : "Send out invitations to 
the brass bands and orders to the fife-and-drums." 

It was during the Amnesty campaign also I first 
came to know Mr. Patrick Egan, who afterwards 
contributed in so large a degree to the most solid 
and worst requited work connected with the organisa- 
tion of the Land League. Egan, who was a pros- 
perous Dublin merchant, was one of the quietest 
and most meekly spoken of men, but possessed in a 
remarkable degree the keenest political acumen, and 
a courage which nothing could dishearten, combined 
with a prudence in which no Irish revolutionist in 
my circle of knowledge ever excelled him. He 



136 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

was an "opportunist" in the best sense — that of an 
opportunism based on the interests of his country, 
and not upon any interest or ambition of his own. 
Ready for any sacrifice himself, he never hesitated 
to stand up against those who, impotent to effect 
anything themselves by force of arms, would yet cry 
anathema upon all who offered the country a brighter 
prospect of success by other methods. Characteris- 
tically enough, too, of a good many of the revolu- 
tionary chiefs, while he fought the priests with 
gloves of steel in their crusades against the extreme 
men, he was at heart unshakably a Catholic. When 
the Government struck their first dangerous blow at 
the Land League, and the Executive betook them- 
selves to Paris, I remember one evening in a hotel 
of the Rue de Rivoli a man, who was then (but 
not for long) a member of the Executive — the only 
foul-mouthed man or enemy of religion I ever came 
across among the Land League leaders — burst out, 
as was his habit, into some extremely coarse abuse 
of priests and nuns. Egan listened without a word. 
As the fellow's language grew more loathsome, we, 
who knew Egan's storm-signals, saw the tips of his 
ears redden and a bright scarlet point appear in the 
centre of his cheeks. Suddenly, as a lightning flash 
in a roll of thunder, he flamed forth — "You filthy dog, 
I've put up with a good deal. If you utter one word 
more against my religion in my hearing, by G — 
Almighty I'll smash your pig's head into a pudding ! " 
The mighty oath with which the defence of 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 137 

religion was all unconsciously mingled gave a certain 
comic relief to the tension of the situation ; but 
religion was safe, the "one word more" was never 
spoken. It only remains to add, by way of com- 
mentary upon the usual accompaniments of a foul 
tongue and flippant irreligion, that some months 
afterwards, when Parnell was arrested and the Land 

League suppressed, fled from the storm by 

the first train from Dublin to his country home, and 
was never heard of more in Irish politics. 

The Amnesty to the Fenian prisoners afforded 
Butt an "opportunity of endeavouring to blend the 
moderate and revolutionary forces in a great effort 
for constitutional freedom through their influence. 
I related in an American magazine, as follows, an 
incident which proves him to have striven hard for 
that friendly alliance which Parnell, in more pro- 
pitious circumstances, effected seven years later : — 

A banquet was being given to the first batch of 
amnested Fenians in Hood's Hotel, in Great Brunswick 
Street, Dublin. I was sent up by the Cork Herald — a 
shy and inexperienced boy, completely overawed by the 
immensity of Dublin — to report it. It turned out that 
it had been resolved to be wiser in those dangerous times 
to have no newspaper report of the speeches ; but, as a 
friend, intimately known to the famous John Nolan and 
Mr. P. F. Johnson, of Kanturk, who were the organisers 
of the banquet, I was made personally welcome at the 
board. Butt had been engaged at the Four Courts during 
the day, in the trial of a man named Barrett for firing 
at a Galway landlord, and the jury were sitting late to 
finish the case. It was not until the dinner was over, and 



138 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the speech-making begun, that the great counsel arrived 
with the news that he had been victorious and the prisoner 
acquitted. Flushed with the triumph, he stood up to 
speak, and, in a life of pretty large experience, I have 
never yet heard a more body-and-soul thrilling speech, 
with two exceptions — one being Captain Mackey's speech 
from the dock in Cork, where he had the very judge in 
a flood of tears ; and the other, Mr. Gladstone's lion-like 
" flowing-tide " speech the night the Home Rule Bill of 
1886 was beaten. 

Butt's speech was almost wholly a plea to the released 
Fenian leaders to give him a chance for trying other 
means. He was argumentative, pathetic, passionate by 
turns ; but the passage that will always live in my memory 
was that in which, in language actually blazing with the 
divine fire of eloquence, he declared that, if the concilia- 
tory methods he pleaded for failed, he would not only 
give way to those who would lead where all the nations 
of the free had gone before them, but that, old as he was, 
his arm and his life would be at their service in the 
venture. At John Nolan's suggestion, I had taken a note 
of the speech, and when the banquet was over, I went to 
Mr. Butt to beg for permission to publish a speech with 
which the blood of everybody present was still tingling. 
He was dismayed at the request. He said he had been 
told there were to be no reporters present, and that the 
publication of the speech would ruin all hope for his 
contemplated movement. I told him that, of course, his 
wishes would be respected ; but he continued to show so 
intense an anxiety on the subject that, in order to com- 
pletely reassure him, I threw my note-book into the fire, 
where it peacefully burnt away. I thought then, as I 
have often thought since, that there perished in the ashes 
not only an interesting piece of history, but one of the 
most divine outbursts of eloquence that ever left human 
lips. Some rumours crept into the English papers that 
Mr. Butt had made an extraordinary speech at the 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 139 

banquet, and the Chief Secretary was asked a few nights 
afterwards in the House of Commons, what notice was 
to be taken of Mr. Butt's conduct as a Queen's Counsel ; 
but, of course, there was no record of the speech, and the 
matter went no further ; and the fact gave me some com- 
fort for returning to Cork empty-handed, after destroying 
a note-book which would now be worth more than its 
weight in gold. 

The question whether the extreme men were to 
tolerate the Home Rule Federal Movement or 
stamp it out came to an issue on the eve of the 
Home Rule Conference of 1873. It would have been 
illegal, even at that late date, to have summoned a 
Convention of elected delegates. Butt had to con- 
tent himself with a "Conference" in the Rotunda, of 
such elements as might choose to present them- 
selves. The extreme men went up to Dublin in 
great force ; and, as it was known that their attitude 
would decide whether the Conference was to end 
in triumph or ignominy, great was the disquietude 
of the country gentlemen, Members of Parliament, 
priests, and town councillors, who formed the bulk 
of the assembly, as to the upshot of their delibera- 
tions. It was my good fortune to attend the con- 
fidential meeting in a Dublin hotel (the Angel, if 
I remember aright) at which the final decision was 
taken. John Nolan and Pat Egan were breast- 
high for cordial co-operation. So was Mr. John 
O'Connor Power, who was shortly after to be 
member for Mayo, and was at that time a chief 
potentate in the Supreme Council's mysterious 



I40 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

sphere of influence ; a man of great resolution, with 
a merciless underjaw, a furious temper governed 
by a carefully studied urbanity of manner, and a 
calm, strong voice, that made the most common- 
place observation impressive ; resolute enough in 
the ways of revolution to have himself headed raids 
for arms, and walked for years under the shadow 
of the gallows, but gifted also with a common-sense 
keen enough and fearless enough to guide him in 
the evolution from the impracticable to a wise and 
patriotic possibilism. 

Another striking personality at the council-board 
that night was Mr. John Ferguson, of Glasgow ; 
never, I think, a sworn revolutionist, but for more 
than a quarter of a century one of the most trusted 
and picturesque figures in every historic Irish scene 
— what with his mane of jet-black hair, the flash of 
his fanatical eye, the erect courage of the Northern 
Protestant, his rich rhetoric and lifelong devotion 
to noble ideals and, in his own favourite words, 
"eternal verities." There were not wanting fire- 
eyed young disputants from the country, who would 
have no compromise, and who would have welcomed 
back the brutalities of the Penal laws, and the 
pitch-caps and floggings of the savage yeomanry 
of '98, rather than put their trust in Parliamentary 
agitation. There were, again, men like Mr. C. G. 
Doran who, while profoundly distrusting any doctrine 
but that of arms, were not prepared to refuse at 
least a tolerant trial of his plans to a leader of 



vn PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 141 

genius, on whose personal sincerity, at least, he 
could rely. 

And this was the spirit which eventually pre- 
vailed. I have never lost the impression of high 
and self-denying patriotic duty, struggling against 
a congenital repugnance to Parliamentary ways and 
men, which characterised the solemn deliberations 
of that night. . To poor Butt's intense relief (for his 
was a nature as full of sensitive chords as a Stradi- 
varius fiddle), Nolan and Egan were able to bear 
him good news an hour or two after midnight ; and 
when, the next day, Mr. O'Connor Power arose 
from the midst of the Extreme Left to speak his 
message of toleration and encouragement, a quiver 
of delight went through the Conference, and many 
of the shakier Members of Parliament, who had 
been waiting to see how far it would be safe to 
stand aloof from this irksome new movement, 
promptly made up their minds that Butt's flag was 
going to sweep the country. 

It was not an unquestioning allegiance, however, 
that the Extreme Left promised to Butt's move- 
ment, but only toleration, and toleration qualified by 
a time-limit. As O'Connell had been led into the 
rash prediction that an Irish Parliament would be 
sitting before the end of the " Repeal Year " of 
1843, so Butt allowed himself to be drawn into a 
wager, at Canon Rice's table in Queenstown in 
1865, that an Irish Parliament would be won within 
ten years from that date. He was held mercilessly 



142 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

to his prediction by the impatient and incredu- 
lous. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, deeply 
depressed as the country still was by recent failures 
and repressive rigours, any real success in girding 
up the national energies anew was at that time pos- 
sible. All went smoothly on the surface, but went 
half-heartedly also. There were many sporadic 
outbursts of fine national spirit in the course of 
Butt's movement, in almost all of which, as it 
happened, I had the privilege of living much 
behind the scenes, with a pressman's gift of 
invisibility for the general public, but none 
the less a friend and confidant of the principal 
actors. 

There was the famous Kerry election of 1870, 
in which the landlord nominee of Lord Kenmare 
and the Catholic Bishop received an unmerciful 
beating from the young Protestant squire, Mr. 
Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett, who had just 
left Oxford glowing with a gentle passion for Home 
Rule. It was the first time (and indeed the last) 
that the mere watchword "Home Rule" seized upon 
a whole county with the power of some ancient 
word of enchantment. It was the cry with which 
men daily saluted one another in the streets, and 
it was echoed back from the remotest fastnesses of 
the Kerry mountains, as we passed, by night or by 
day, through the rains and tempests of that wild 
winter. I can still hear the pretty academic drawl 
of the candidate's " Howm Rule for Ayland," and 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 143 

the full-mouthed, full-hearted " Hawm Rooil " which 
was shouted back by the multitude, in the delightful 
music of the broad Kerry Doric. It was the last 
contested election in Ireland before the Ballot Act 
came into force ; and many were the scenes of 
intoxicating excitement, as the tenants burst from 
the custody of their landlords, and, in many cases, 
of their priests as well (although some of the most 
beloved of the Kerry priests respectfully but firmly 
declined, like their people, to be led to the polls 
by Lord Kenmare or the Bishop), and, having 
availed themselves of the landlords' cars as far as 
the polling -places, deserted the jaunting-cars and 
their escorts of dragoons, and, heedless of eviction 
or of penalties more dreaded still, dashed up to the 
polling-booths to give expression to the irrepressible 
Irish spirit within them. 

Another event which did much to restore belief 
in the purity of Parliamentary life was the return of 
" Honest Joe Ronayne " for Cork City. Ronayne 
was one of the highest types of incorruptible 
rectitude our race has produced, and was possessed 
withal of a geniality and wit unsurpassed, even in a 
city where any chance crowd around a platform will 
bubble over with bons mots worthy of those who 
"drank champagne with the wits" in the days of 
the giants. His friend, Denny Lane, himself a 
charming combination of poet, wit, and chemist, in 
his beautiful words over Ronayne's grave, compared 
him to one of those vessels of Venetian glass of 



144 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

such exquisitely sensitive material that they fell to 
pieces at the touch of poison. 

A party that contained Joe Ronayne could never 
be wholly lost. It was from him, on one of his 
returns from Parliament, I heard the first intimation 
of the greatness of Parnell. Ronayne was then 
growing sick of the vainness and hollowness of the 
Parliamentary fight. " I have known a paving- 
stone or a black bottle to do better work for Ireland 
than the entire lot," he said. " There is nothing for 
an Irish Member to do in that infernal House except 
to drink himself to death or look for a place. I 
would not think it worth the price of the railway 
ticket to go back there, only for one young man 
who's barely able to utter three consecutive sen- 
tences. Keep your eye on Parnell. He's as meek 
as a Methodist minister, but he'll tread upon John 
Bull's corns harder than ever Boney did." 

Ronayne himself, who had made a fortune in 
California as an engineer and subsequently built 
several Irish railways,^ was unhappily an old man 
already. The snows had completely taken possession 
of the thick fleece of hair and beard that fringed his 
lion -like head. His fortitude and wit did not 
desert him, even on his deathbed. The surgeons 
found the amputation of his leg from the thigh to be 
necessary. The ether they administered to him had 

^ He used to say of one of them, the Macroom Railway, which he 
built at his own financial risk : " You need never be afraid of being 
hurt by an accident on the Macroom Railway. 'Tis built upon tick ! ! " 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 145 

no effect upon his powerful brain, and he watched 
the operation throughout without flinching. When 
it was completed, "Well," said he, "I suppose I 
cannot stand iox the City any more, but I'll certainly 
stimtp the County ! " Alas, Fate did not spare even 
courage like his. When the surgeons had gone, the 
wound began to bleed afresh, and before they could 
be called back, Cork had lost for ever its noble 
representative, and the Home Rule movement one 
of its principal organs of vitality. 

Dr. Croke's strong hand and clear sight were not 
yet there to save the influence of the clergy from the 
danger caused by the propensity to range themselves 
in politics in opposite camps from their people. In 
Longford, they opposed the election of the sweet- 
tempered veteran, Mr. John Martin, in the interests 
of a young military popinjay, who was the son of a 
local nobleman and landlord ; and to such extremes 
did their zeal push some of the more intemperate, 
that I have heard Mr. A. M. Sullivan (who was, 
perhaps, the devoutest as well as most eloquent 
Catholic champion of his generation) relate that, on 
Sunday morning, after he had received Holy 
Communion at the Longford Cathedral during the 
contest, he heard himself denounced from the altar 
by name as an infidel and a Garibaldian. A no less 
remarkable conflict broke out in Limerick County. 
Mr. W. H. O'Sullivan, who was for some years the 
tallest man in the House of Commons, and bigger 
in heart even than in his inches, was, for some 

L 



146 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

obscure reason, the object of a denunciation signed 
by the Bishop and priests of Limerick, who took 
the side of a detested local CathoHc landlord, named 
Kelly. The result was that at several of the country 
chapels men stood up in the midst of the congrega- 
tion and made answer to the comminations hurled 
at them from the altar. When the ballot-boxes 
were opened, it was found that the candidate of the 
democracy was returned by an overwhelming vote 
by one of the most tenderly Catholic constituencies 
in the island. 

Among the general body of the Catholic clergy, 
indeed, there was no hostility to Butt. There were 
even many who were his fast friends, although I 
can remember only one who was a constant figure 
on his platforms (a glorious old gentleman from the 
County Clare, Father Quaid, P.P., of O'Callaghan's 
Mills, the bare memory of whose beaming Irish face 
and sesquipedalian eloquence makes the world feel 
warmer and kindlier).^ But the truth is that, with 
the people and the priests alike, the movement, to 
use the slang of a later day, never "caught on." 
All the triumphs at the polls just mentioned were 
isolated explosions directed to nothing in particular, 

1 His last public manifesto was a letter to the Nation^ indignantly 
protesting against a handsome obituary notice of him which that 
journal had published on the report that he had passed away. " I 
humbly supplicate, Mr. Editor," he wrote, " with the consciousness of 
truth and justice, nay, I demand in tones of thunder, that you will 
deliver over the author of this dastardly libel upon my character to 
the public pillory, there to be pelted with scorn and overwhelmed 
with the execrations of his indignant fellow-countrymen." 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 147 

except the relief of irrepressible National feeling, 
quand meme. At the General Election, it is true, a 
party of sixty Home Rulers were duly returned with 
a general mandate to follow Butt's lead. But they 
formed? an incongruous and barbaric mosaic, sheld 
together by no discipline and a not much larger 
quantity of principle. A few gifted Nationalists like 
Ronayne and A. M. Sullivan were jostled on the 
one hand by blunder-headed Tory landlords, like 
Colonel King-Harman, and on the other by a group 
of mild-mannered Whig lawyers, open to suggestions 
of a place, while a still larger number of excellent 
arm-chair politicians knew little what exactly they 
were driving at except to retain their seats. 

A vigorous public opinion, alone, could have 
kept such a team passably together within the shafts ; 
and of such a public opinion Butt had not even the \ 
rudiments. In his own constituency of Limerick 
(and it was his most reliable citadel) he came second 
on the poll, the first being a local lawyer who after- 
wards subsided into a commissionership in Dublin 
Castle.^ His organisation had scarcely any genuine 
local branches, and, as I have mentioned, could not 

1 Mr. Henry O'Shea tells me that at this second election, which ; 
was his first under the Ballot Act, Mr. Butt was himself afraid he | 
would be defeated, owing to the power of corruption and the torpor 1 
of public opinion. Another singular miscalculation as to the effect \ 
of the Ballot Act was made by Mr. Gladstone, who, in the House 
of Commons, challengingly told Mr. John Martin he was ready to 
compete with him in the ballot for the favour of his Irish fellow- 
countrymen. The Ballot Act was, on the contrary, the death-blow 
of English party influence, as well as of landlord influence in 
Ireland. 



148 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

hold a public meeting, even in the friendly city of 
Cork, without a fight for the platform with the uncon- 
vinced Extremists. His genius, so to say, provided 
Ireland with the egg from which all good things for 
her have since come forth ; but the time was not yet 

\ warm enough to hatch it. \ The folly of the English 
Parliament completed the failure which the scepticism 
of the country and the unreliability of his Party 
commenced. The moment English Ministers found 
the Irish leader spoke from the lofty eminence of a 
constitutional statesman as to statesmen of equal 
good faith, and that there was neither rebellion nor 
agrarian tumult to be apprehended behind him in 
Ireland, they concluded, as usual, that the Irish diffi- 
culty was disposed of, and went to sleep without 
heeding the voice of Butt's high constitutional 
appeals. The time came when all the world under- 
stood that in enunciating the principle of devolution, 
in place of revolution, Butt had done an epoch- 
making thing for England as well as Ireland ; but 
the time was not yet for anything except stolid 
indifference in the English Parliament. 

It was mournful to attend Butt's annual "account 

' of his stewardship " in the Limerick theatre, and 
hear him go through the monotonous litany of his 
" assaults all along the line of English misgovern- 
ment in Ireland." The "assaults," after several 
years' weary battle, yielded nothing but a tiny Act 
to abolish the law against Conventions, and enable 

I the City corporations to nominate their sheriffs. It 



VII 



PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 149 

was the one ewe-lamb which he had to bring home 
as the reward of all his buffeted and ill-appreciated 
genius. There was the inevitable mixture of 
tragedy and farce in the story of his decline. At a 
banquet one night in his honour in the theatre, the 
discontent of the Extreme Men first openly showed 
itself in an irruption of turbulent young men, one of 
whom, a chimney-sweep whose face was black as 
Eblis with the recent labours of his profession, 
jumped on one of the tables laden with glasses and 
decanters, and marched up the whole length of the 
table, crashing through a procession of breaking 
glass as he went, to put some question to the un- 
fortunate guest of the evening — what question 
history will never know, for the sweep was hurled 
off the table by a gigantic Limerick man in almost 
as dilapidated a condition as the broken glassware. 

Not, indeed, that the mass of the people then or 
ever showed any ungrateful insensibility to Butt's 
fine qualities, or those of any man who ever strove 
his honest best in their cause. But there was no 
sign of progress tangible enough to give the reply 
to the impatient cry that a sufficiently fair trial had 
been given to constitutional agitation, and that it 
had once more proved fruitless. What was 
practically the end came one Easter Monday, 
when Butt rode in a great procession of the trades 
and country Nationalists to a meeting at the 
O'Connell monument. Mr. John Daly, who was 
then in the prime of manhood, and who, had he 



I50 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

received the educational training that would have 
curbed an impetuosity sometimes bordering on 
arrogance, might have been one of the intellectual 
forces of his time, made up his mind to break up 
the procession by the strong hand. He acted 
wholly of his own volition, and in defiance even 
of his own hierarchical chiefs in the secret move- 
ment. His principal lieutenant in Limerick, a 
man of the finest and most chivalrous character, 
besought him to give up the project, but, finding 
him obdurate, with the soldier's spirit, took his 
place and suffered by the side of his chief. It 
was an extraordinary scene, and highly though it 
amused flippant Englishmen with the spectacle of 
Irish quarrelsomeness, it had deeper lessons for 
those who might conceive it to be truer wisdom to 
conciliate Irish disaffection than to deride it. Daly's 
band did not number more than fifty all told. 
They took their stand in a double rank in front of 
the O'Connell monument, facing the procession 
which was winding its huge length along through 
George's Street. When the head of the procession 
arrived within a couple of dozen yards of the 
monument the charge was given, and, with uplifted 
cudgels, the fifty rushed right into the thick of the 
oncoming thousands. There was a sharp and 
bloody struggle for a few minutes. Then, when 
word reached the processionists in bulk of what 
was happening, there came a general rush to the 
front, and the disturbers were utterly borne down 



VII PHYSICAL AND MORAL FORCE 151 

by the torrent — some stretched bleeding on the 
ground and the rest fighting gallantly to the last as 
they were driven off the field. Butt's meeting 
went triumphantly forward — movements of National 
dimensions never are killed at a blow — but Butt's 
Federalism received its death-wound, as a popular 
force, that day in Limerick, as surely as O'Connell's 
Repeal movement did the night of Peel's proclama- 
tion of the Clontarf Monster meeting. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SICKNESS, POLITICAL AND PHYSICAL 
1870-1875 

Enough has been said to explain why I turned away 
with an equally heavy heart from the revolutionary 
and from the constitutional camps. That junction of 
their best forces, in which alone I could see hope, 
was beyond any power of an unknown youngster to 
bring about ; and the stupid self-complacency of 
English statesmanship, in view of a divided and dis- 
heartened Ireland, proved that we had many a year 
to wait still before my mad vision, in the Daily 
News letter, of a reconciliation between the two 
races on the basis of a frank recognition of Irish 
Nationality, could be anything except a vision. 
Gladstone fondly believed he would extirpate Home 
Rule by offering the Bishops a Catholic university, 
and Gladstone was in front of his countrymen by a 
generation. Of the old Republican, who died when 
all seemed lost, in the days of the Second Empire, it 
was written : 

N'ayant pu I'eveiller, il s'etait endormi. 
152 



CHAP. VIII SICKNESS 153 

Having failed to awaken the slumbering spirit of 
the country, he had fallen into slumber himself. It 
might stand for the epitaph of my own boyish 
political activities. 

For five years to come, I lived almost wholly for 
the second great passion of my life — one which, at 
every intermission of my feverish public career, has 
invariably struggled hard to become the first — I mean 
the love of books and letters. Indeed, the thirst for 
reading and the impulse to get initiated, no matter in 
how insignificant a capacity, in the divine mysteries 
of authorship, had never abated ; but the twofold 
passion now broke forth with a violence and want of 
measure which, as has been too often the fault of my 
methods of work, knew no restraint except complete 
bodily prostration. 

It would be, perhaps, hard to find a more cruel 
commentary upon the position of Irish Catholics, in 
the matter of University education, than the fact 
that the only reason why I entered the Queen's 
University was to gain access to a library. I should, 
indeed, have dearly loved to enter it for the sake of 
the Arts' course, but that enticing field was closed 
to Catholics by the rigid decree of the Bishops 
against the godless Colleges. In the nature of 
things the Bishops relaxed their rigour in the case 
of what the Germans call the " bread-studies," other- 
wise Irish Catholics would still be all but as com- 
pletely debarred from the professions of physic, law, 
and engineering as they were under the Penal 



154 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Statutes of Queen Anne. I therefore elected to 
matriculate in law, as the profession for which I 
had the least aversion of the three ; but, in truth, 
the overruling motive was not any hankering for 
the learned profession of the law, which I never 
contemplated following, but the desire to get at the 
rich store of books in the library of the Cork 
Queen's College ; the other motive, I am sorry to 
say, being to add to our small family income by 
making a raid upon the College Scholarships. And, 
as the preliminary College fees were a difficulty for 
a slender purse, I think the eagerness to earn them 
had a good deal to do with the amusing energy I 
displayed in turning out all sorts of literary handi- 
work and trying to find a market for it. If the quality 
had only been equal to the variety and fecundity, 
it would be a truly surprising brood of romances, 
short stories, essays, newspaper correspondence, 
pages of history, and comic literature which were 
presented at the doors of almost every publisher in 
the three kingdoms. There was even a five-act 
drama called Bride or Banshee ? It may be 
suspected who the heroine was. Indeed, the 
eminent actor-manager, Mr. Clarence Holt, to whom 
I submitted the manuscript, gently hinted that there 
was nothing except heroine in it. 

The serious will, no doubt, frown at my thinking 
it worth while to relate the adventures of my first 
full-length novel, which had the absurd title of 
'Neath Silver Mask. (I remember nothing of the 



VIII SICKNESS 155 

story except its title, which was, I think, intended 
to mean that Revenge might sometimes make a 
shining excuse for itself.) Nevertheless, these adven- 
tures may divert more frivolous minds, and possibly 
even help brave young Irishmen against that ten- 
dency to be easily discouraged which is one of the 
weaknesses we inherit from a history of unvarying 
failures. Two small scribbling- books which sur- 
vive from that time supply me with the necessary 
material, except during the two years when any in- 
cautious memorandum of mine was liable, at any 
moment, to come under the eye of the police. 
Here is the record of no less than twenty -two 
publishers to whom, one after one, I persisted in 
proffering the manuscript, until at last, in a mood 
of vexed philosophy, I jotted down in advance a 
prolonged programme of failures : — 

Aug. 22nd. Chapman and Hall won't have it. — Aug. 
2gth. Nor Tinsley Brothers. — Sept. ^tJi. Routledge " is 
not in the habit of publishing new works of fiction." Off 
goes the manuscript again by to-night's post. I will 
pester the whole tribe of them. — Sept. 2>tk. All the Year 
Round was at least prompt with the usual answer. The 
unfortunate manuscript is getting badly tattered, but it 
will hold out another while. To-night to Smith, Elder, 
and Co., Waterloo Place. Here is my programme as at 
present advised : — S. E. and Co. ought to let me have it 
back by Monday or Tuesday. Bentley, New Burlington 
Street, comes next, who will probably send it back by 
Saturday. Manuscript will then be ready to be dis- 
patched to Duffy, who, of course, can't afford to buy. 
Irish too poor and English too English. After that, the 



156 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

haughty Longmans ; Cameron and Ferguson, Glasgow (who 
have a good Irish drop in them) ; perhaps a London 
magazine or two ; and then I suppose it will find its grave 
somewhere in some Cork or Dublin weekly newspaper. 

Sometimes the courage of the author vi^as much 
plucked down by those incessant rebuffs. 

After recording the despatch of the manuscript 
to S^. Pants Magazine — 

" God speed the plough ! En parenthese, He won't 
speed it — at least NOT THIS TIME" (in printed 
capitals). " But this is only my way of hedging, to give 
myself at least the comfort of being a true prophet, if 
only a prophet of evil. . . . The bill for postage will be 
twice the price I will ever get for it. I am pretty tired 
of the world's ways. I verily believe I would be a monk, 
only for the stings of the flesh ; or a farm-labourer, if I 
could exist on stirabout ; or a wanderer on some South 
American pampa or cordillera, only for the ties that chain 
me here." 

But there was always sure to come the prompt 
reaction. Under the above gloomy entry comes : 

Later and cooler — Second thoughts are better, after all, 
than anything the Andes could give me. I am not quite 
so savage through vexation as not to see through the 
nonsense a man writes when he gets back a manuscript. 
Goldsmith, when he lived up Break-neck-Steps, would 
have thought my salary a sumptuous one ; and he had 
the Vicar of Wakefield \n his brain. Off with the immortal 
manuscript by next post to Boiv Bells. 

I had come humbly to — Bow Bells. As vainly, 
too, as to the Muses' more regal abodes. The 
story at length found its expected " grave " in a little 



SICKNESS 157 

Dublin journal for ladies, called the Biliet-Doux, 
the proprietor of which valiantly bid ^10 for the 
copyright, but some months afterwards went bank- 
rupt and compounded with me for 30s. ; and as the 
poor man liked the tale so well that he contemplated 
publishing it in book-form, I was a great deal more 
sympathetic with his misfortunes than indignant at 
the composition. But the adventures of 'Neath 
Silver Mask were not over yet. Amongst my 
varied incursions on the publishers, I had offered 
the copyright to Mr. Patrick Donahoe, the pro- 
prietor of the most prosperous of the Irish- American 
journals, the Boston Pilot. On April i6th, 1871, I 
received a reply from Mr. John Boyle O'Reilly, the 
editor of the Pilot, intimating that " Mr. Donahoe 
will take the story for publication in the Pilot, and, 
of course, remunerate you for it. He cannot, how- 
ever, publish it for some months, as we have just 
received a long story from Sister Clare (the Nun 
of Kenmare), which we publish next." ^ 

A note scribbled on the other sheet of the letter 
was to me, however, far the most precious portion 
of the communication : — 

"Pilot" Office, Boston, Mass., 
loth March 1871. 
William O'Brien, Esq. 

My dear Sir — I wrote the other side as editor of the 
Pilot. Let me write a word as an admirer of your story. 



1 Mr. Donahoe subsequently published the story in a pretty 
booklet, which was my first offspring in the book-world. 



158 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

When you sent your first communication here, I read it 
and advised Mr. Donahoe to accept it. I have since read 
what I have seen in the Billet-Doux, and I congratulate 
you heartily on your success and ability. 

This paper has an enormous circulation in comparison 
to all other Irish journals, and I trust that its readers will 
long be acquainted with your capital work. — Sincerely, 

J. Boyle O'Reilly. 

The writer vi^as, perhaps, the most influential 
Irish-American who ever lived. O'Reilly, who 
entered the loth Hussars to acquire a military train- 
ing, was a Fenian convict, who escaped from Western 
Australia in a row-boat under romantic circum- 
stances. It was my happiness many years after to 
make his acquaintance in the midst of his own city 
of Boston, where for his irresistible personal charm, 
no less than for his fame as a poet and publicist, 
he was as beloved a legend with the New England 
Puritans as the commander of the Mayflower, and 
by the Irish population of Boston was scarcely less 
adored than Robert Emmet. He had once marked 
out, by the banks of his native Boyne, the spot 
where he should like to take his long sleep ; but 
when it was proposed to transfer his body to Ire- 
land, Puritan and Irishman alike rose up and 
declared they would meet on another Bunker Hill 
the men who would come to take him. Of such a 
brain-power and a heart-power over the prejudices 
of the very Blue Laws of Massachusetts was the 
Irishman for whom English wisdom could find no 
better use than a flogging in the barrack-square of 



SICKNESS 159 

Dublin and a den in a West Australian convict 
hulk! 

In the meantime, I had applied myself with all 
my mental thews and sinews to win the Law 
Scholarship at the College. The text-books were 
Williams on Real Property and Austin's Juris- 
prudence. The latter had a sufficient flavour of 
metaphysics and high state philosophy to reconcile 
me to its quaint locutions, and another of our text- 
books, Maine's Ancient Law, was full of charm ; 
but the English Law of Real Property never im- 
pressed me as being any better than the deep-laid 
plot of a cunning attorney to cheat whole genera- 
tions of people in advance. Even Blackstone was 
not able to throw a decent vesture over the fraud. 
All the same, I burrowed my way determinedly 
through the mountains of learned lumber, with no 
more love for the law than the mining engineer has 
for the quartz through which he blasts the way for 
his tunnel. In addition to the daily grind of short- 
hand-writing, and evenings devoted to all sorts 
of literary scribblings, I would tunnel away through 
the law-books far into the night, by the light of a 
single candle, until my eyesight began dangerously 
to fail me, and the entries in my scribbling-books 
grew full of apprehension of some critical operation 
or of total blindness. The Matriculation Examina- 
tion was to take place on Tuesday, October 17th. 
As the day approached, the problem where the 
College fees were to come from rose up before me, 



i6o WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

full of terror. Various ephemeral Dublin papers 
and magazines which printed my contributions dis- 
appeared into space, or into the Bankruptcy Court, 
before payments arrived, and our family expenses 
absorbed every shilling of my salary. To have 
stuffed my brain with all the intricate puzzles of 
the Law of Entails and the Pandects, and, at the 
last moment, find all the labour lost for want of a 
few contemptible guineas, was to rouse a feeling of 
despair which I did not fail to confide plentifully 
to the sympathetic bosom of my diary. 

The day before the Examination had actually 
arrived when there happened a singular coincidence, 
of a kind not altogether rare in a life full of strange 
chances, happy and otherwise. Let my journal tell 
the tale : — 

Oct. i6th. Had great hopes in a certain quarter of 
getting the money. Beaten again. Will make another 
great effort with D. A. N.,^ but he tells me money is 
tight. It is my last chance for to-morrow. 

1 Alderman D. A. Nagle, the managing proprietor of the Herald, 
who was twice Mayor of Cork and one of the wittiest of its witty 
citizens. Having contested Mallow for a seat in Parliament and got 
only seven votes, he good-humouredly said, " Well, there's one prayer 
I'll say devoutly all my life, Libera nos a Mallow/" During his 
mayoralty, Queenstown made a determined attempt to secede from 
Cork and establish a port authority of its own. There was question 
of a motto for the new flag of the seceding township. " Let me 
suggest one from Horace," said Mayor Nagle, " Svie cortice nabit — 
'twill swim without Cork." Nagle, who was a solicitor in large 
practice, did not himself escape from the inveterate gift of the Cork 
punster. Once when a bill of costs of his was under consideration, his 
friend Joe Ronayne cried out, " Of all the terrors of the law, commend 
me to a peck from the bill of a nagle." Even the Church was 
not spared by the " prime boys." An amiable and eloquent Arch- 



VIII SICKNESS i6i 

Immediately underneath comes this postscript in 
lead pencil : — 

P.S. — Hardly have I written the above when a letter 
is put into my hands from the owner of the Boston Pilots 
enclosing a draft for £\0 and inviting me to further 
contributions ! No trouble remains for to-morrow but 
to get the draft cashed. Very, very grateful to Heaven, 
and yet not half enough ashamed of myself for my fears. 

I M^on my Scholarship all right, although my 
competitors included two graduates of mature age 
and far better knowledge of law than I, who had 
come from the Belfast and Galway Colleges, as 
is the custom, to net the money prizes for which 
the Catholic South offered few claimants. Some- 
what to my mortification, I was distanced for the 
^5 French Prize by a young fellow who had been 
brought up in the schools of France and Germany. 
The defeat was, however, more than compensated 
for by bringing me, for the first time, into contact 

deacon, who had a special success in the aristocratic world of 
Montenotte, as the fashionable quarter of Cork is called, was popu- 
larly known as " the Apostle of the Genteels." The crowd was as 
ready as the professed wit. Once while a Member of Parliament 
at an election meeting was denouncing his opponents as " a party of 
pledge-breakers," he demanded, "Why, what are these men's pledges 
worth ? " " Yerra, they would not give you the price of a pint for 
them at Hegarty's " (a well-known pawn-ofifice), promptly replied a 
thirsty soul from the crowd, plainly a man experienced in the value 
both of pledges and porter. Nor have the humours of Cork died 
out. The day the present worthy member for Cork, Mr. Augustine 
Roche, an amiable and eligible bachelor, was installed as Lord 
Mayor of his native city, the new Lord Mayor, having returned 
thanks, cried out, " Next business, gentlemen ! " " The next busi- 
ness," observed a grimy but gallant wit from the gallery, " is to select 
a Lady Mayoress." 

M 



i62 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

with Charley Tanner, who in later times, as 
member for Mid- Cork, was one of the most 
picturesque of the blithe band who fought and fell 
in our Irish Iliad. He was at that time in the 
flower of his youth — handsome as an Antinous, 
with the muscle of a Roman wrestler. 

I grieve to say the Queen's College never 
inspired me with any greater tenderness for her as 
an Alma Mater than a short sojourn in an inn 
would justify in the case of the landlady. It was a 
singular institution — so capable of great things, with 
its beautiful Elizabethan halls, and its really gifted 
staff of professors, but struck with utter sterility by 
the curse of English misgovernment which will for 
ever act in Ireland on Dr. Johnson's blunt Anglo- 
Saxon axiom, "In everything in which they differ 
with us, they are wrong." The President was one 
of the most eminent Irishmen of his generation. Sir 
Robert Kane, the author of the famous scientific 
tract on The Industrial Resources of Ireland-, 
but either Sir Robert Kane was not living in his 
delightful Tudor residence, or at least I never saw 
him, eager though I should have been to do him 
worship. The Gaelic Professor, again, was the 
learned Mr. Owen Connellan, who edited the 
I^our Masters ; but he also had disappeared from 
view, and, although I would myself have gladly 
invoked his aid to help me over the stile of my 
lame Gaelic studies, I was the only student 
whimsical enough to think of such a thing, and, as 



vm SICKNESS 163 

I was not an Arts student, I had no right to call him 
back to his chair. Our own Law and Jurisprudence 
classes consisted of four students, in a lonely corner 
of a vast class-room, and I always commiserated 
our two excellent Professors while they were 
unfolding their stores of learning to so diminutive 
an audience.^ 

The only thing I really loved about the College 
was its library ; but here was all that youthful 
intellect could languish for — the mellow light and 
classic traceries of a cloister, with books enough, 
high up to the roof, to make one think life was not 
long enough to turn out their treasures to the sun. 
But the library did not serve to deepen my 
passion for the Law. Like Hylas, the Greek boy 
sent with his urn to the fount, who " neglected his 
task for the flowers on the way," I turned gladly 
from the law shelves to the Elysian Fields of belles- 
lettres that spread world-wide around me, as far 
apart as Shakespeare from Beranger, or Burke's 
august State papers from the sweet seclusion of the 



1 It must in justice be added that I never heard a word hurtful 
to religion fall from the lips of any Queen's College professor. As 
for the students' own etat dhiine, those whom I knew, while they 
loved, like myself, to lose themselves in clouds of metaphysics, 
were firm in the faith of their fathers to their very heart-wood, while 
the effect on their politics is sufficiently described by the fact that there 
was a flourishing "Circle" of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood 
among the stalwart medical students from Limerick and Tipperary. 
The Cork Queen's College, like all the rest of the elaborate plans for 
decatholicising and denationalising Ireland, gave England no better 
return for her pieces of silver than Balaam made to Balak when he 
was sent for to curse Israel. 



i64 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Lake country ; and went through just as much 
legal drudgery as was needful to earn my Scholar- 
ships, but no more. My appetite for reading was 
insatiable, but lawless. Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto 
I followed up with great enthusiasm, the first-named 
to remain for life a part of my intellectual being ; I 
plodded on into Schiller's plays and even into the 
confines of Goethe, along the platitudinous road of 
Ollendorf. The Gaelic, as I have mentioned, had also 
some inexplicable charm for me, and I struggled with 
some persistency through the jagged, unpronounce- 
able consonants of the Ossianic Society's Middle 
Irish texts, with the aid of O'Donovan's ponderous 
Grammar, which I found to be about as wise a 
proceeding as it would be to set about learning 
modern English conversation out of the Anglo- 
Saxon Chronicle — as I found to my cost from my 
old nurse, who could not understand a word of the 
Middle Irish I stammered out, while in her own 
mouth all the rugged consonants, over which my 
tongue scrambled in despair, melted into a stream of 
liquid vowel-sounds. Two aphorisms from one of 
the mediaeval Gaelic laments have haunted me a 
thousand times in subsequent years of struggle for 
Ireland. One was: "Linen shirts on the race of 
Con, and the foreigner all in a mass of iron " ; and 
the other was : " It was never the Sassenach that lost 
the battle for the Gael, but the Gael that lost it for 
one another." They were the secrets of Ireland's 
ill-luck in battle, and still worse luck in council. 



VIII SICKNESS 165 

My pen went on all the time as feverishly busy 
as my eyes. 

April 20th (1872). Another story on the stocks to 
be called Kilsheelan ; or The Old Place and the New 
People. Everything, including my eyes, warns me to 
wait until I have more writing power ; but reasoning goes 
for nothing in these matters. 

The project, with many others, was cut untimely 
short. 

July I '^th. Two months have been blotted out of my 
year by a fit of small-pox, which went near blotting 
myself out also. Thank God, it has done me little harm 
— only settled my chance of this year's Scholarship. 
Went at my manuscript to-day ; found it very queer — 
the story and myself 

Sept. 2nd. Not a month, but four gone. It is only 
now I am settling down hard to work, but the Scholarship 
is gone and the Law, I think, with it. Twelve chapters 
of story finished ; it grows on me a little. Sight causes 
me greatest anxiety of all. 

The twelve chapters written by the small-pox 
convalescent were promptly packed off to a 
publisher, with a prompt result : — 

Sept. i6th. This ought to be written with a pen of 
gold. Smith, Elder, and Co. of London think so well of 
the portion of my story sent them that they ask for the 
remainder ! It is the first word of cheer I have ever had 
from London. I cannot do the thirty odd chapters in 
less than two months, but I'll do my best. 

The story begun in a sick-room was hurried 
through at as furious a rate as could be managed 
by an author who morbidly and ridiculously pictured 



i66 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

to himself the great London publisher as waiting 
eagerly for " copy," and who wrote under the sword 
of increasing ill-health and the terror of a total loss 
of eyesight.^ By October 19th I was able to write : 

I've been able at last to send off ten chapters more of 
story. I think it grows interesting. It has been a time 
of hard work in the office, and what with that and a 
couple of hours for my books, I can hardly compose my 
nerves for a fit of enthusiasm when I must cool off again. 
If I had only a pair of good eyes again ! . . . A calamity 
from Boston. The Pilot has been burnt out with half the 
city, and with it, I fear, the prosperity of my best friends. 
How pitiful my grumbling in comparison ! 

The manuscript must have been completed within 
two months after, for under date "Jan. ist (1873)" 
comes the following entry : — 

A great blow is my new year's gift. I am reeling 
under it still — but not crushed. Smith, Elder, and Co. 
return the manuscript with some severe criticism and will 
have none of it. They may be right. We shall see. 
I have a suspicion that the Irishness of the story was its 
worst crime in their eyes. If so, I am glad they had 

^ The right eye had grown affected with conical cornea and was 
almost useless, and the disease had spread to the other eye. Having 
been warned that a critical operation would be necessary to stop it, 
and that I was probably too weak to go through it and live, I made 
my way to the most eminent London surgeon-oculist of the day, 
Mr. Critchett in Harley Street, who gave me the joyful intelligence 
that the disease was due largely to over-exertion and constitutional 
delicacy, and might rather diminish of its own accord as I grew 
older. " The only prescription I shall give you is — eat, drink, and 
be merry," he said. " I suppose, sir," I observed, " you are too 
kind to add, ' For to-morrow you die ! ' " " So shall we all," he 
said with a cheery laugh. *' You have as good a chance of a long 
day as I have." In aJl of which my eminent adviser, whom I have 
long outlived, proved to be right. 



vni SICKNESS 167 

cause to reject it. Have sent off the manuscript to 
Chapman and Hall, who will, of course, reject for the 
same reason, if there be no other. 

Reading over the really sympathetic and 
judicious letter of Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co.'s 
Reader, in later years, I found the suspicion by 
which irate adolescence avenged itself to be quite 
unjust. The Reader only thought of the story what 
I thought of it myself a couple of years afterwards. 
Its subsequent fortunes are only notable for an 
example of Irish persistency (no matter what our 
censors may say) under every discouragement of 
ill-health, narrow means, coldness from English 
publishers, and bankruptcy or mischance blighting 
the friendliness of Irish ones. Sometimes, indeed, 
after months of peregrination from one shut 
publisher's door to another, that taunting voice : 
" Where's the use of it all ? " which lurks for ever 
by the enthusiast's bed, would echo through all the 
desolate infinities of the soul, and my despair would 
seek comfort in some extravagantly tragic confidence 
to my diary. For example : — 

May \otJu Three months' haggling with publishers, 
English and Irish, and for result — sick, sick, sick ! As 
ill-luck should have it, the Boston Pilot people, who had 
promised to publish it, have been burnt out again. I'm 
tired of literature, tired of politics, tired of sickness, tired 
of life. I am too bad to be good (as I should so pine to 
be), and too good to be bad (as there is constantly 
danger). 



i68 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

But adolescence need not take its despair too 
tragically, any more than its anger. Youth and 
stubborn hope would promptly reassert themselves, 
as in this entry of the following day : — 

May wtlu Re above — Bosh! Men are here for 
something better than to whine. Off with the manuscript 
again on its travels — this time to Chapman and Hall. 

Kilsheelan in the end subsided peacefully into 
an Irish weekly paper, where it was published 
anonymously. It must have struck a certain chord, 
for I afterwards found it republished in the Buenos 
Ayres Southern Cross, and in a Montreal magazine, 
the Harp, where they paid it the superb but quite 
unmerited compliment of attributing the author- 
ship to the delightful Tipperary romancist, Charles 
Kickham (another of the aerial Irishmen of genius 
for whom Dublin Castle could find no meeter 
reward than a sentence of twenty years' penal 
servitude). 

In 1874 the breakdown of my health grew more 
and more alarming, and for more than twenty years 
to come made my life an incessant struggle between 
bodily languor and a strong will. To complete the 
misfortunes of the household, the malady began to 
develop which ended by sweeping away every mem- 
ber of my family except myself. My elder brother, 
James, who had got re-employed with a firm of ship- 
ping agents, had to undergo the winter hardships of 
the wild Irish seas, and even his frame of iron, already 



vm SICKNESS 169 

tried by his night adventures in the importation of 
arms, began to be mined by a cough which would 
not be silenced. My younger brother, Dick, was 
blest also with a constitution of extraordinary hardi- 
ness. His passion was sport. He would start off 
at midniorht with his fishino--rod to reach the 
Ahadillane river, fifteen miles away, by daybreak, 
and would tramp through the water up to his knees 
all day, and arrive home during the night, having 
had no better refection than a chunk of bread 
carried in his basket, with the addition, possibly, of 
a trout broiled in some peasant's cabin. In the 
sister joys of rabbit and rat hunting he had an 
inseparable ally in an old gentleman, got up in a 
rabbit-skin cap and clothes of the utmost poverty, 
who, nevertheless, was a baronet of ancient founda- 
tion, Sir Emmanuel M , and in his rags a 

sweetly courteous gentleman still. The queerly- 
assorted pair were a source of amused interest to 
me, as they set out on one of their expeditions, with 
their dogs and their ferrets — the boy fuller of respect 
for the old man's ferret lore than for his title, and 
Sir Emmanuel listening with a profound deference 
to Dick's saore conclusions as to the fence that 
would be worth hunting, or the holes where there 
might be a chance of a fox. One of my poor Dick's 
tramps through the river was too much for him. 
He contracted a prolonged rheumatic fever, from 
which his heart and lungs never wholly recovered. 
My sister Maggie, again, began to grow pale and 



ijo WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

complain of a haunting cough, or rather to suffer it 
without complaining, for during nearly four years 
of uninterrupted suffering a word of complaint never 
passed her gentle lips. Finally, my mother, who 
bore the weight of all our separate ailments in 
addition to sorrows of her own, was only prevented 
from becoming the fifth invalid of the family by the 
necessity for forgetting herself in care for all the rest. 
Many an hour has been spent since in bitter self- 
reproach for my stupidity — purblind bookworm that 
I was — in not observing all these things sooner. 
Fondly though we were all bound together by the 
closest family attachment, we were all to a great 
extent affected by that most unwise reserve which 
makes one ashamed to make much spoken demon- 
stration of affection, and I was little taken into 
confidence as to the troubles of the household, as I 
took nobody into confidence as to my own. Owing 
to the irregularity of my reporting hours, I nearly 
always dined by myself late in the day, and I have 
a shrewd suspicion now that all the cares of the 
kitchen were concentrated upon my own entertain- 
ment, little though it was noticed at the time, 
owing to the bad Irish habit of paying little atten- 
tion to what one eats (or sometimes whether one 
eats at all, for that matter). The feast was a simple 
one enough — generally not more than a mutton 
cutlet — but it was a cutlet with a frosted crust of 
gold, and some dainty accompaniment of lemon- 
pudding, or jelly of Carrigeen moss, which somehow 



SICKNESS 171 

carried an exquisite flavour of motherly solicitude 
and of sisterly refinement (for my sister was a 
famous cook). In after days the question often 
tormented me whether their own meals were equally 
appetising? It was, indeed, only the woman's 
instinct of self-sacrifice which forbade them to 
enjoy a life of modest comfort ; for, what with all 
my varied earnings from regular newspaper work, 
irregular literary scribbling, and College prizes, 
even during the period while I was the only soutien 
de famille poverty never visited us in any really 
repulsive shape. 

The agony of doubt as to whether I should be able 
to raise the ;^8 matriculation fees was the most serious 
pecuniary embarrassment of my life, and is, indeed, 
the only money trouble of any kind I can remember 
since days when I was too young to understand 
what money troubles meant. Throughout my life 
I have acted upon the three principles of spending 
whatever I had, much or little, of never getting into 
debt, and consequently of keeping no bank account, 
for the good reason that there was nothing to 
account for. The result being that whether the 
income was great or small the balance-sheet was 
equally satisfactory. I am very far, indeed, from 
recommending for general imitation a rule of conduct 
so improvident. If I had not been so quickly and 
so long left alone in the world, each of the three 
principles would have infallibly come to grief; but 
in the special circumstances of my life it so happened 



172 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

that, amidst almost every other conceivable form of 
distress and danger, the only pecuniary troubles 
that have ever given me a pang have been the 
troubles of other people. For one other blessing 
I owe Providence a debt of gratitude which all the 
treasures of the Incas could not pay. It is, that all 
my women relatives, without exception, have justified 
the seemingly impossible ideals of the sex with 
which I set out in life ; and, for the sake of human 
nature, I am rejoiced to think the experience cannot 
be an uncommon one, since, applying to my circle 
of friends the test of the sweetness, purity, and 
unselfishness which have blessed my own home, 
I have seen nothing to shake my faith in the 
diffusion of similar inborn charms in the sex in 
general, after nearly half a century of a rough 
world's disenchantments in other respects. 

The horrors of insomnia soon came to complete 
my physical breakdown, and, fast upon the track of 
the insomnia, a cure which only increased its horrors. 
Hydrate of chloral had only just been discovered, 
and its vogue as a cure for all the ills of man was at 
its height. A not very judicious physician prescribed 
it as a remedy for my sleeplessness. To one oppressed 
by the nightly procession of " the dread hours clothed 
in black " the relief of sinking languorously to rest in 
the arms of the Green Goddess was, in the begin- 
ning, an indescribable luxury. As I was wholly 
ignorant of the nature of the terrible drug, the 
temptation to continue and increase the dose was 



SICKNESS 173 

irresistible. But the awakening soon enabled me to 
understand what the unfortunate Baudelaire meant 
when he described his head as " a sick volcano." 
My own homelier sensation was of a harrow being 
drawn slowly across the brain and back again. 
Soon, as I walked through the streets, a megrim 
would suddenly set my brain spinning, and I would 
have to grasp at a railing or lean against a door to 
prevent myself from falling. I began to experience 
all De Quincey's horrible symptoms. 

The method I took to deliver myself from the 
drug while there was yet time required a certain 
resoluteness of purpose and brought much suffering 
for a time. It was to undertake long walks far into 
the night, in order to produce by mere exhaustion 
the same effect that the chloral did by its easy and 
voluptuous, but deadly spell. These walks were 
taken mostly on the western side of the city, and 
extended over twenty, thirty, and even forty miles of 
a night, once stretching as far as the town of Mac- 
room and back, a walk to Blarney being reckoned 
a mere hors cVoeuvi'e of a night's bill of fare. 

Most of my friends of those years were students 
or newspaper men, as unconventional as myself,^ who 

1 Another, and one of the dearest, was (and is) the Rev. P. F. 
Kavanagh, the Franciscan, a Wexford man, best known as the author 
of The History of the Insurrection of 1798, in which his relatives 
bore a heroic part. He was one of the dreamiest and most simple- 
hearted of men, ready for a sublime martyrdom either for Faith or 
Fatherland, but too modest not to keep even that unselfish ambition 
shrinkingly concealed in his heart. Father Kavanagh was not, how- 
ever, my confessor, but a saintly Italian Father of the Capuchin 



174 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

would be content to walk by the hour declaiming 
metaphysics, poetry, and biography, but drew the 
line at these seven-leagued-boots' expeditions by 
night in search of sleep. Accordingly, after my day's 
reporting, College lectures, reading, or scribbling, I 
would set out alone at seven or eight o'clock in the 
evening, along the beautifully wooded banks of the 
Lee, and spend four, five, or six hours on the road, 
fighting down the mocking spirit of the hydrate of 
chloral. Two extracts taken from my journal will 
give a sufficient glimpse of my usual thoughts and 
adventures on the way. 

I. From the Dyke I could see the lights in the two 
Palaces ^ of Madness on the right and of Crime on the 
left, and had some gruesome thoughts how little separated 
me from either of them. . . . Later on the moon came 
out over those darling valleys of the Lee which I have 

come to love only less than River, woods, blue, blue 

sky in frostwork frame of silvery clouds — it was as if 



Community, a being so etherealised that snuff seemed to be his 
only earthly nutriment. I hope that his imperfect knowledge of 
English did not count for me among his attractions as a confessor, 
but my experiences were sometimes sweetly humorous. After I had 
told my tale in fear and trembling, he would interrogate me as to 
any iniquities I might have forgotten, as thus : " Did you rob any- 
ting ? " " Did you beat your faader ? " This was easy ground, but 
the rising smile was instantly chastened by some such little homily 
as this : " Dat is fery good. But Christ did more for you dan your 
faader. He is your God and He did die for you, and it was your 
sins and mine did kill Him." And I came away with the vivid 
impression that it was mine and not his that were really enormous 
enough to be worth sorrowing for. 

1 The County Jail, in which, indeed, it was my fortune afterwards 
to pass eventful days, is a conspicuous building on one side of the 
Western Road, and the vast District Lunatic Asylum crowns a hill 
on the opposite side. 



VIII SICKNESS 175 

heaven was opening. If it only would, and let us hear 
just one word of cheer, what a world it would be ! and 
how easily we might dispense with the jails and mad- 
houses ! For shame ! Were the incredulous Jews any 
worse, when they wagged their heads and cried out : * If 
Thou be the son of God, come down from the Cross ' ? 
The heavens, forsooth, must open for every fool who 
won't be content to fall down and know his littleness. 
Nisi efficiamini sictit par-vuli — is it not wisdom enough 
for a half-crazed nocturnal rambler ? What an ingenious 
torture-chamber is this poor brain-pan of ours, which, in 
this scene, all of beauty and restfulness, must fasten on 
the only thought that is unpleasant and disquieting ? 

2. Found myself a little after twelve at the gate of 
Curraghkipawn ^ and waited for ghosts. Horribly fright- 
ened, but determined to hold my ground. The silence 
was really as awful as anything else could be. But there 
was nothing else. Came away after waiting nearly an 
hour, and found my legs trembling. Got home by four, 
but it was not worth while going to bed before the 
Kilmallock train. 

Hydrate of chloral never passed my lips again. 
The process of cure was, perhaps, the greatest feat 
of v^^ill-power of my life — next to the creation of 
my toy army and its wars. The power of sleep 
gradually returned, and remained my sheet-anchor 
during many tempestuous years. The habit of 
walking immense distances is perhaps to be thanked 
for a certain hardiness and staying-power which has 
mingled strangely with my incessant, and sometimes 
almost moribund, weakness of body. Doubtless 
these solitary night rambles are answerable also for 

^ A lonely graveyard on a height, some five miles from Cork. 



176 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

an ever-growing preference for retirement and 
avoidance of the world's noisy ways. No trace of 
misanthropy ever in the least embittered this sense 
of unfitness for society. I had, on the contrary, the 
warmest delight in seeing others, and especially 
those whom the French call \h& petit peuple, enjoy 
themselves, and could I have enveloped myself in 
the fabled coat of darkness, would have joyfully 
lingered in the midst of their festivities. 

My fear was rather the morbidly self-conscious 
one of boring people, and of timidly counting the 
hours over which the duty of entertaining them 
might extend. I think reading of the sparkling 
nights of Pope and Bolingbroke, and of Johnson's 
and Burke's godlike encounters of wit at the Club, 
led me to form impossible ideals of what conversa- 
tion ougfht to be in order to make social life worth 
living ; and I have never been altogether disabused 
of the illusion, notwithstanding the superabundant 
evidence of real life that an honest fat-wits is more 
generally popular than a sayer of brilliant things. 

A misanthropist in Cork City would indeed 
be an unaccountable animal. Its people would 
coax Timon of Athens himself into good humour. 
They are a people in a most singular degree 
facile a vivre, neighbourly, soft-mannered, sunny- 
hearted — the citizens of a pious Paris, with all 
the Parisian vivacity and no sting of the Parisian 
diableide — gifted, as I once tried to describe 
them, with a mellifluous accent and a caressing 



SICKNESS 177 

tenderness which make the welcome of the people 
of Cork to those they love the most seductive music 
in the world.^ In any case, my newspaper occupa- 
tions perforce saved me from retiring wholly into 
my cloudland. Without any volition of my own, 
it so happened that I came to be acquainted with 
almost every hamlet in Munster, and with an 
incredibly large number of its people, when all 
my natural cravings would have banished me into 
some wilderness with my book and pen. 

As time went on, however, our little home grew 
more and more to be a house of sickness. A great 
lethargy seemed to be settling down over my life ; 

1 Even their quarrels have an element of good-fellowship. Once 
the physical-force men tried to capture Parnell on one of his earliest 
visits to Cork, in order to stifle the constitutional movement at its 
birth, but finding the crowd who met Parnell at Blarney Station too 
formidable, turned their attack on one of his foremost friends in 
Cork, who had shortly before proposed a resolution pointing out the 
folly of a recent raid for arms. Producing their revolvers, they 
insisted he should get down from the carriage by Parnell's side. He 
was a man of magnificent physique, and although for peace sake he 
complied, he stood facing with his umbrella the couple of dozen 
somewhat desperate-looking men who, with their revolvers presented 
in his face, surrounded him on the road, " Come," he cried, " pitch 
away your revolvers and come inside the ditch and I'll fight the best 
three men among ye." Late that evening I visited the smoke-room 
of the Victoria Hotel, where the revolver men and the object of the 
outrage sat amicably discussing the day's doings. " There's no use in 
talking, Con," the latter remarked, " you were the worst divel of the 
lot." "Well, sure, we were always good friends, John," replied the 
gentleman of the revolver party, *' and why didn't you leave it to the 
Peelers to find fault with the boys for the Passage Raid ? " " Yerra, 
there are no bones broke," cried out a third. " Name your drinks, 
boys, and we'll all sing 'God Save Ireland' and have done with it." 
Which was accordingly done. The man who that day stoutly faced 
the revolvers. Alderman John O'Brien, lived to be thrice Mayor of 
Cork and one of the best beloved of all his genial fellow-citizens. 

N 



178 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, vm 

but I had still energy enough left to heed the 
doctor's warning that total change of life and scene 
was now the best of all prescriptions. Some social 
sketch I had written of Cork had the good fortune 
to attract the attention of Mr. Edmund Dwyer 
Gray, the proprietor of the Freeman s Journal, then 
in the full force of his youth and enterprise. At his 
invitation, I accepted a post on his great paper, and 
bade farewell to Cork, little suspecting in the 
remotest corner of my soul that I should live to be 
welcomed back with honour and affection to " The 
Beautiful Citie," where I was only too content to 
float through life in the same gentle obscurity in 
which " the pleasant waters of the River Lee " 
make their way through the verdant woodlands to 
the great sea. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE 'freeman's JOURNAL* 
1876-1880 

It was no fault of my colleagues if my four years on 
the Freeman s Journal si2i^ vie.v& not as light-hearted 
as they were easy. A blither band, or a wittier, 
never lit up a table at Button's or the Mitre Tavern. 
"The Chief," the late Mr. Theophilus MacWeeney, 
might have been Lord Chancellor, if he had been a 
lawyer and if he had not been an inveterate lover of 
fun. His fine head, with its crown of tossing curls, 
as he sat at the head of the revels in the reporters' 
room, would have adorned a full-bottomed wig, so 
solemn were its lines and so massive the expanse of 
forehead, only for the grin of benevolent merriment 
that would steal out of his blue eyes as, with a 
parental fondness, he watched his young barbarians 
all at play. The Chief was by no means an old man 
when he died, but for his existing colleagues he 
had been an institution in the Freeman office so long 
beyond living memory, that he was much chaffed 
about his age. "Theophilus," one of the leader- 
writers, " Dick " Adams,^ would ask (he alone had 

^ As County Court Judge of Limerick, where his solid good sense 
and rough justice have secured for him, in an extraordinary degree, 

179 



i8o WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

the courage to address him by that sacro-sanct title), 
" is it the fact that you were flogged by Major Sirr 
for your report of the arrest of Lord Edward Fitz- 
gerald ? " " My dear Richard," the Chief would 
imperturbably reply, " reserve your curiosity. You 
will be in a position to ascertain the fact for yourself 
from the Major one of these days, whenever the 
devil gets his due." Adams' shafts were directed 
as freely against himself as at any of the circle of 
friends who loved or feared him. After a long series 
of Liberal victories in 1888, there was a turn of the 
tide in favour of the Tories, and Adams, who was a 
somewhat vacillating Whig, with certain mild Nation- 
alist leanings not inconsistent with the pursuit of a 
place, was observed in an unusually gloomy mood by 
the group around the library fire at the Four Courts. 

" Still thinking of the election, eh, Adams ? " 

asked one of the seniors. " Yes," was the reply, " I 
was just thinking whether I haven't got down at the 
wrong side of the fence." 

He used to give this description of three 
of the most aggressively Nationalist members 
of the staff: "O'B. is the sentimental Fenian, R. 

the confidence of all classes, Adams continues to be one of the most 
unconventional and humorous of judicial personages. When asked 
if the Court would adjourn over the Easter holidays, he astonished 
the Bar with the reply, "Who ever heard of a Judge sitting on Good 
Friday since Pontius Pilate ? " On another occasion he decided a 
right-of-way case, sitting by the side of a fence on the site in dispute. 
Another morning he horrified the judicious and delighted the hearts 
of the injudicious by leaning over the bench, after his arrival, and 
asking urh' et orbi : " Will some gent kindly lend the Court a ' bob ' 
to pay my Jehu ? " 



THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' i8i 

is the comic Fenian, and O.'S. is the bloody 
Fenian." The staff included a priest and a parson, 
both of them men of the sweetest and most ex- 
emplary character, and miracles of gentle toleration. 
The latter, the Rev. Mr. Carroll, Rector of St. 
Bride's, who used to contribute quaint old historic 
papers, the product of his excavations in Marsh's 
Library and Trinity College, dressed so like a priest 
that he was popularly known as " Father Carroll." 
"When will we have you inviting us to your first 
mass. Father Carroll ? " the Chief once asked, in a 
quizzing humour. " My dear man," was the reply, 
" it puts me to the pin of my collar to believe all I 
have to believe as a plain Protestant Clerk." 

The clergymen were but day-visitants, however. 
It was only by gaslight, late in the night, the merry 
company was to be seen at its best round the ugly 
deal table, from Lefroy, the principal leader-writer, 
the brilliant but mordant ironist, and Guinee,^ most 

1 W. B. Guinee of Cork, afterwards a highly successful London 
journalist and author. His imagination made it so fatally easy for 
him to soar into all sorts of wild flights, much more interesting ta 
read of than prosaic facts, that he contracted a sovereign contempt 
for mere accuracy, and, half in a tricky humour, but never in malice, 
sometimes treated his readers to the most outrageous extravaganzas 
related in solemn earnest. When the body of the murdered Lord 
Naas reached Dublin, Guinee gave a superb description of the 
military arrangements for the funeral, and of the vast open square 
of Coldstream Guards formed for the reception of the coffin. On 
this majestic scene his Puck humour suddenly introduced a vagabond 
bull-dog that rushed into the centre of the square, made a ferocious 
attack from behind upon one of the officers collected in a group in 
the centre, and, to the horror of the assembled multitude, made off 
with a tremendous mouthful of the unfortunate officer's bleeding flesh. 
When he had worked up the horror to its height, Guinee proceeded to 



i82 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

daringly Imaginative of the "descriptive men," down 
to the unfortunate junior whom the Chief designated 
as " the lowest joint of the editorial tail," with the 
occasional irruption of a Lord Mayor on his way 
home from a banquet, or an actor who dropped in 
after the theatre, or a privileged politician who 
called around to revise his speech ; and there the fun 
would go on, fast and furious, until the editor, Mr. 
J. B. Gallaher, would throw open the door and, with 
a face clothed with thunder, would burst forth : 
** Adams, are we to announce we have dropped 
leading articles in this paper to-morrow morning, and 
dispensed with the services of the gentlemen who 
used to write them ? " and then, softened in the 
genial glow of the company, would himself relax into 
some old reminiscence of the day he " consecrated " 
this or that Archbishop, or of the night when he — 
even he — most reverend and cautiously whiggish of 
men of peace, went to Newgate Prison to take part 
in a rescue of John Mitchel.* 

Edmund Dwyer Gray, the proprietor, was the 
most enterprising newspaper man Ireland ever pro- 
relieve the public anxiety by relating that, happily, the bull-dog had 
only carried off a bleeding beefsteak which the officer was carrying 
home for breakfast, and which he had stowed away in a tail-pocket ! 

^ For a quarter of a century Gallaher steered the Freeniati through 
a thousand dangers with an instinct akin to genius. Its interests 
were his supreme law. Once, when the Freoiian began to coquet 
with Land League doctrines, a veteran Whig journalist raised a voice 
of remonstrance. "What is the Freeman coming to," he remarked, 
" to play the game of a gang like that ? " " My dear Ferdinand," 
was the solemn reply, " the country is going to the devil, and the 
Freeman is bound to go with the country." 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 183 

duced. Next to Parnell, his loss was the most 
serious blow that fell on Ireland in this generation, 
and in the capacity for business on a vast scale he 
was Parnell's superior. He would have been a 
historic Chancellor of the Exchequer. As so often 
happens in the case of English judgments of Irish- 
men, the House of Commons was the last place in 
the world where they would have suspected him of 
genius. He had a thin, piping voice, and made a 
poor figure in the dramatic suspension-scenes of which 
Irish Parliamentary life then so largely consisted. 
The only time I ever heard him at his best in the 
House of Commons was once on the Post Office 
Estimates, when he made a plea for the Government 
purchase of telephones, then in the infancy of their 
development — a plea which, if it had been heard, 
would have revolutionised the whole system of rapid 
communications ten years before the rest of the 
world mastered his fore-knowledge of the telephone. 
It was in a thin house, but those who heard him that 
night listened with amazement to one of the most 
brilliant masters of figures that ever shone even upon 
an assembly accustomed to Gladstone. He was half 
a generation before his time also in the appreciation 
of linotypes ; and in all the bolder schemes of Dublin 
municipal enterprise — where the feebler staggered 
at the expense or trembled before the clamour of the 
ignorant or interested — he bore a timid and a dazzled 
Corporation on his back, like the roc in the Arabian 
Nights, to the Valley of Diamonds in the distance. 



i84 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

But his imagination was engrossed wholly in 
business. In the purely political sphere he stumbled 
in the dark, groping for guidance. He once collided 
with Parnell, in the earlier stages of that great man's 
development, and may have possibly, for the moment, 
ambitioned to be the first among his countrymen, as 
he was unquestionably marked out by Nature to be 
the second. But he was quite free from malice and 
accepted hard facts with an almost extravagant 
readiness. Many years afterwards, in my bedroom 
in the Imperial Hotel, on the eve of the luckless 
Gal way election, when Mr. Healy urged Gray to 
disregard Parnell's approval of the candidature of 
Captain O'Shea, and, if necessary, take the field 
against him in the Freeman, I remember Gray's 
good-humoured reply, while his large dark eyes 
gleamed with fun, and his hand twitched at his chin- 
tuft, as was his wont, when deliberating : " My 
dear Healy, I once tried a fall with Parnell and got 
the worst of it. I'm not going to try it any more." 
The chief source of his weakness, however, was a 
certain want of faith which came, with other weak- 
nesses, from an ill-directed youthful training. In the 
words of a keen observer of men, " he was a cui bono 
man," or rather, he possessed in a splendid degree 
the vigour of mind capable of taking delight in great 
projects and even in great dangers, but at some 
critical stage his faith in himself or in the general 
scheme of things would all of a sudden fail him, 
and, in political affairs especially, he would accept 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 185 

the blind degree of Destiny with an indulgent 
scepticism. 

My personal relations with him were those of 
warm friendship and even affection. Any contribu- 
tion, even slightly remarkable, made to the Freeman 
was sure to be followed by a handsome cheque, 
accompanied by a few words of infinitely greater 
value. He pressed me hard to become a regular 
leader-writer for the paper; but, apart from the 
drawbacks of incessant illness, the views of the 
Freeman were sometimes (and for reasons which the 
vastness of the property at stake easily suggested) 
of too indecisive a hue in National crises to make it 
possible for me to undertake any personal responsi- 
bility for them. While he reigned at the Mansion 
House as Lord Mayor of Dublin he was in the 
flower of manhood and in the full glow of his 
luminous intellect — rich, handsome, courted, and, 
above all, blessed with a wife whose beauty and 
inexpressible charm enhanced tenfold her husband's 
popularity, and who, when the first conflict of the 
Land League cycle broke forth between the Court 
of Dublin Castle and the Mansion House, made 
even the small-souled snobi7iettes of Dublin society 
hesitate between the worthy Duchess who presided 
at the Castle and the gracious lady who lit up the 
Mansion House festivities like a Fairy Queen. 

With such an employer and such comrades, it 
may be guessed that, for ease and outward bright- 
ness, life on the Freeman left little to be desired. 



i86 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Once in a way, in some special emergency, I would 
gird up my loins for a great effort, on the strength 
of which weeks and months would pass in smooth 
and indolent calms. For example, my frequent 
** marking " was for half-a-dozen of the Courts, from 
each of which, by a system of exchange with 
reporters and barristers, what was called "a fat 
paragraph " was to be obtained. To one of my own 
sensitive texture, hours of hard labour evolved out 
of my own head would be preferable to lolling about 
Courts for scraps of information, depending upon 
the complacency of busy or insolent men (for the 
reporting profession was still in the statusless 
condition in which the reporter, within one circuit 
of the clock, might be fawned upon by the very 
highest and snubbed by the very lowest). 

But a wave of the Chief's wand would transform 
this task from a day of servitude to a day of lazy 
luxury. His own duty being confined to seeing the 
work of the staff efficiently done (and Napoleon 
had never a better grip of his Marshals), the Chief, 
instead of consigning me for the day to the Four 
Courts, would carry me off on the top of a tramcar 
to the foot of the Dublin Mountains, or the breezy 
shores under Howth Head, chatting all the time of 
some famous lawsuit, illustrated by a marvellous 
mimicry of the chief actors therein ; or would lead 
the way to some quaint corner of old Dublin, where 
Swift was born, or where Grattan had his town- 
house, or where Sir Bernard Burke kept his little 



THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 187 

treasure-house of heraldic curiosities, under the hoary 
Bermingham Tower of Dublin Castle, or where the 
heads of the Brothers Sheares in the vaults of St. 
Michan's were still as well preserved as the day 
they were hanged (for his memory was an encyclo- 
pedia of pre-Union knowledge); then would return 
for his afternoon cup of coffee and buttered scone at 
his favourite coffee-shop, where he would have his 
joke with the delightful Professor Galbraith on the 
humours of the Home Rule movement, or chaff 
Brother Nunn on the mysteries of the Imperial 
Black Preceptory of Orangemen, of which he was a 
Grand Master; after which he and I would stroll 
up leisurely past the book-shops of the quays to the 
Four Courts, and he would plant himself against one 
of the statues in the hall, as the Courts were break- 
ing up, and, in the course of ten minutes, had my 
day's work in his hands, signalling to the barristers 
as they went past to disgorge their contributions, 
with observations such as : " Anything in the 
Master's to-day, O'Shaugh ? "— " Well, Peter, I'm 
told you down'd the Big Serjeant?" — "Just ten 
lines of that Jaimdyce v. Jarndice case of yours in 
the Rolls, Val " ; or (in a confidential whisper to a 
young barrister blushing in his first Breach of 
Promise action) "Glad you won your verdict, Luke. 
Have you got the little MS.?" (his affectionate 
way of alluding to a pocket-speech). Better than 
all else, the dear old Chief was a pearl beyond price 
as a friend and adviser, being indeed one of the only 



i88 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

two men (Alderman Hooper of Cork being the other) 
I ever met with whom a consultation meant the cer- 
tainty of wise guidance in the most knotty difficulty. 
Betimes, however, I atoned for those summer 
hours by tasks of some magnitude, and of a certain 
influence over the fortunes of the paper. One of 
these was the investigation of a historic agrarian 
struggle on an estate around the Galtee Mountains, 
the results of which were published in a series of 
letters entitled ** Christmas on the Galtees." It was 
to me memorable as affording me the first intimate 
and never-to-be-forgotten insight into the horrible 
realities of the Irish Land question. From the 
knowledge then acquired I date that persuasion that 
Landlordism is the deepest root of Irish misery, 
which has been one of the two inspiring influences 
of my public life, and which makes the abolition of 
that fatal institution a sufficient recompense for 
whatever penalties the long wrestle with Landlord- 
ism and the powers behind it has cost me. It was 
the case of a poor mountainous estate, jobbed about 
in the Incumbered Estates Court from one land 
speculator to another, until it reached the hands of 
a wealthy English manufacturer, Mr. Nathaniel 
Buckley. Gladstone's well-intended Land Act of 
1870, far from protecting the miserable tenants, 
whose own toil and capital had given the soil three- 
fourths of whatever value it possessed, only stimu- 
lated the English speculator to evade the Act by 
revaluing the property, and in most instances 



THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 189 

doubling and even trebling the rents, by reason of 
the tenants' own improvements. 

They were as inoffensive a population as inhuman 
cruelty could select for its victims. The wrong 
would probably never have been articulately heard 
of, only for the accident that a Tipperary man 
named Ryan, of the true dogged breed, married 
into a family on the estate and settled down there. 
This man soon made himself audible by the old, 
desperate expedient of the blunderbuss. He fired 
into the face of the agent in his own grounds, and 
the agent was only saved by the fact that the charge 
of powder was insufficient to make the pellets 
penetrate. He next, with an old man, a brother 
Tipperary man named Crowe, lay in wait for the 
agent and his police-escort on the Mitchelstown 
Road, and riddled the car with pellets, killing a 
bailiff and wounding the agent and a policeman. 

In the invariable Irish way, the grotesque 
mingles with the horrible in the exploits of this 
desperado. The agent's house at Galtee Castle 
was situate at a point at which the three counties of 
Tipperary, Limerick, and Cork touch. The assassin 
could have waylaid the agent with safety in a wood 
shading the Tipperary portion of the avenue, but, 
as the law directed the blood fine for agrarian 
murder to be levied off the county in which the 
crime took place, his loyalty to Tipperary forbade 
him to impose this penalty on his fellow-countymen. 
He accordingly stationed himself in the Limerick 



I90 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

section of the avenue, when he discharged his first 
blunderbuss, and the Limerick ratepayers had to pay 
^800 for his attempt. On the occasion of the next 
sanguinary affray, he and his brother- assassin 
pitched the scene on the County Cork road, and the 
ratepayers of that county were mulcted in a sum of 
j^iooo compensation to the victims. Tipperary, 
however, paid in blood what it escaped in coin ; for 
the overcharged blunderbuss burst in the hands of 
the old man, Crowe, and he was captured and 
hanged for the murder of the bailiff. I was present 
when the old fellow marched up to the scaffold in 
Cork Jail with an unfaltering step. "Well," he 
remarked to one of the warders on the morning of 
his execution, " God's will be done ! It was the 
wrong man, and I'm sorry for it." His principal, 
Ryan, who was a man of powerful physique and of 
extraordinary daring, remained for several years 
afterwards around the Galtee Mountains, in the 
midst of his police pursuers, in the hope of arrang- 
ing another ambuscade, and did not take his 
departure for America until the agency was sur- 
rendered and the entire dispute happily adjusted. 

Mr. John Sarsfield Casey, who, as a boy, under- 
went five years' penal servitude as a Fenian, was 
living in the neighbourhood, and, greatly daring, 
attempted to substitute the pen for the blunderbuss 
as the palladium of the defenceless tenantry. He 
published a manly protest against the attempt of the 
wealthy absentee land-jobber to turn a Land Act, 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 191 

intended for these poor people's protection, into an 
instrument for doubling and trebling the impost laid 
on their own improvements. The law, which failed 
to lay hands on Ryan, promptly proceeded to gag 
the newspaper-writer. It was the old story of free 
licence for the carrion-crows and vengeance on the 
doves, which sums up the whole history of mis- 
government in Ireland. Mr. Casey was tried in the 
Court of Queen's Bench for criminal libel, and was 
only saved by the disagreement of the jury. But 
the failure of the Dublin prosecution was to be 
avenged by the immediate eviction of forty-seven 
families, who concluded they might as well throw up 
their arms in despair at once as undertake to pay 
the increased rents. The question arose, Was this 
process of barbarism to be carried out without any 
further voice of protest from public opinion ? 

Gray commissioned me to proceed to the estate, 
probe the truth to the bottom, and publish the 
results, whatever they might be, without fear or 
favour. His determination was not without perils 
for the proprietor of a great newspaper. According 
to the current doctrine of the Irish Courts, it was 
libellous and illegal to comment at all on a landlord's 
management of his own property ; and while every 
sentence had to be written under the sword of that 
danger from the landlord side, there was the still 
more awful risk that another discharge from Ryan's 
blunderbuss might any day replace the terrors of a 
suit for libel by the most appalling charges in a 



192 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

criminal court. The results of my inquiry were thus 
summarised in the preface to the pamphlet in which 
the letters from the Galtees were subsequently 
published : 

I approached the estate prepared to find that there 
had been more clamour than was just over the misery of 
the tenantry ; I left it in despair of ever being able ade- 
quately to put before the eyes of the public, for their pity 
and indignation, the shameful scenes which passed under 
my own eyes, in a time of peace and in the name of law. 

The inquiry was original in this sense, that it 
was, so far as I know, the first time when, in place 
of general statements, there was substituted a house- 
to-house visitation, telling in detail the story of every 
family, their crops, their stock, their debts, their 
struggle for life, from documents examined on the 
premises, and in words taken down in shorthand 
from the peasants' own lips. Two hundred and 
twenty-six households on the Galtee estate were 
thus visited, one by one, and the statements of thirty 
other tenants were inquired into. It was a saying 
of Disraeli's that " there is a romance in every life." 
Assuredly, with whatever dismay one might shrink 
from the monotony of those 226 successive stories, 
and the hideous weight of misery that darkened 
them all, I found each separate drama, as it unfolded 
itself in these 226 Irish interiors, so passionately 
absorbing in interest, so eloquent of injustice meekly 
endured, and lifelong industry cruelly repaid, and 
withal so happily relieved in its darkest shades by 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 193 

the people's own picturesque words, by their in- 
describable traits of mystic religious fervour, their 
gracious hospitality, and the humour which is akin 
to tears, that the task of endeavouring to relate it 
all in its apparent sameness but infinite variety 
never cost me a weary moment. 

My report concluded with the following appeal 
to public opinion : — 

This, then, is the issue — whether a quiet, pious, simple 
race, whose own hands have made the barren places give 
forth food, are to be driven from their poor shelter, or 
forced to undergo burdens which are in reality a species 
of veiled eviction, in order to add one paltry thousand 
more to the revenues of a princely stranger. Time was 
when, in those distant glens, a wrong like this might have 
been done and nothing have been heard of it, save some 
maddened wretch sent to the gallows, some procession of 
houseless paupers, some emigrant ship gone down. That 
time is, one may hope, passed. The public opinion which 
has stricken down outrage, has arms long enough to reach 
its causes. Wise rulers will not fail to see with joy how 
eagerly a people just awakening to the power of law, in 
the sense of justice, have carried their appeal to that 
tribunal. Irish opinion has already spoken, and will 
speak again ; from the highest judgment-seat words of 
unequivocal sound have come, without staying the process 
of " settlement." There is a hope remaining, even should 
Irish voices fall on heedless ears. One wave of that 
English opinion, before which Cabinets have fallen and 
nationalities been raised up — one generous impulse, such 
as was at the call of undeserved human misery in Bulgaria 
— would either end this unhappy strife or sweep away 
for ever the law which allows it ; and no Irish agent need 
ever again sleep in dagger-proof blankets, nor an Irish 
tenant oscillate between murder and the poorhouse. 

O 



194 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Let those who wonder at the ingrained Irish 
behef, that nothing is to be had from supplications 
to their rulers, but everything from their fears, be- 
think them how vain was the appeal to justice and 
humanity on behalf of the Galtee peasants. Those 
were the days of freedom from agitation, which 
guileless Englishmen suppose to be days of unclouded 
bliss for Ireland and of all good gifts from England. 
The people had no organisation and no leaders ; 
and the result, of course, was that no relief came to 
the Galtee estate, or to any other, until, a couple of 
years later, the Land League Revolution shook the 
earth and extorted, even from the most far-sighted 
and humane Englishman of his generation, Glad- 
stone's famous confession after he came into office 
in 1880: 

I frankly admit I did not know, no one knew, the 
severity of the crisis that was already swelling upon the 
horizon, and that shortly after rushed upon us like a flood. 

If such was the ignorance of English statesman- 
ship in its highest embodiment, who can be surprised 
if, in the cabins among the Galtee Mountains, there 
was sometimes a weary suspicion that the only 
really effective force of public opinion lay in the 
crack of Ryan's blunderbuss ? 

Not, indeed, that the story of these poor people 
failed to elicit an abundance of sympathy in Ireland, 
and even among individual Englishmen. The Very 
Reverend Dr. Delany, their devoted parish priest, 
who had accompanied me in all my wanderings 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 195 

through the mountains, and under the spell of whose 
sacred influence alone I could have penetrated so 
deeply into the people's hearts, wrote me under date 
May 14th, 1878 :— 

I don't think you have any idea of the effect produced 
by last winter's letters. I received letters from all parts 
of the world in reference to them. An English peer, who 
has large estates in Ireland, sent me in confidence a fierce 
letter denouncing Buckley and Bridge (the agent), and a 
cheque for ^5 : 5s. for the tenants. Orangemen of the 
deepest tint, officers of every grade, and policemen from 
all parts of the country, sent me assistance in every shape 
and form. The English peer to whom I alluded wants 
to know when the letters will be published in pamphlet 
form, as he requires thirty copies, and I know many who 
have written to me in confidence would be delighted to 
have one.^ 



^ The late Mr. Justice William O'Brien, who had been an old 
friend of my father, was as enthusiastic about the Galtee letters as 
the English peer, and growled out, " If you don't publish them in a 
pamphlet, I'll publish them myself, whether you like or no." Judge 
O'Brien, who was soured by his defeat at the Ennis election, where 
he had stood as a Home Ruler, and afterwards by the crimes of the 
Invincibles' Conspiracy, which had marked him out for assassination, 
developed into one of the most infuriated enemies of the Irish Cause 
— to Ireland's heavy loss, for under a gnarled surliness of appear- 
ance he concealed vast ability and a good heart. The story is told 
at the Library fire that the Judge, who was a great book-lover, was 
one day absorbed in the treasures of an Edinburgh book-stall, when 
the plain -clothes Irish policeman who always accompanied him 
glided up and told him a crowd was gathering to observe him. The 
Judge and his escort moved away, under the impression they were 
escaping from a group of Invincibles, and did not suspect that the 
owner of the book-stall had mistaken the Judge's grim hatchet face 
and funereal black clothes for those of the public executioner, who 
had been performing one of his tasks in Edinburgh that morning, 
repeating with wonder to the curious observers : " Hey, mon, who'd 
have thocht it ? 'Twas a volume of The Ettrick Shepherd the black 
fellow was speerin', jest as douce as if he'd ne'er cracked a neck." 



196 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

In another letter Dr. Delany wrote : 

I received, some weeks ago, a letter from a lady in 
Kingstown, signed "Evangeline," enclosing a ;i^io half- 
note (Bank of Ireland, 56,689), stating the other half 
would be sent to Mr. Gray. Could you find out if it 
has reached him, as I don't know who the lady is and 
cannot apply to her. I received yesterday morning a 
letter from Rangoon, from a soldier who read " Christmas 
on the Galtees," enclosing 2s. 6d., and to-day a notice from 
the Railway people, stating that a box of clothes remains 
to be called for. Every week, and sometimes every day, 
letters and parcels remind me of your visit and of the 
achievements of what Father Walsh calls your " awful 
pen." I have been asked a thousand times : " How is 
he?" and the Galtee people tell me they know your 
writing from all others in the Freeman. 

Surely a tribute more agreeable to an author's 
vanity than a chorus of praise from the half-crown 
Reviews ! 

The story of the Galtee estate, I am glad to 
say, had the happy end that is but seldom to be 
found in connection with an Irish drama. Fourteen 
years afterwards, as I was leaving Euston, by the 
Irish night mail, the late Mr. Summers, M.P., one 
of the Liberal Whips, came up and told me the 
new Home Rule Lord-Lieutenant — Lord Houghton 
— was going over by the same train, and proposed 
to introduce me. It is one of the queer anomalies 
of Irish public life that, although the Lord- Lieu- 
tenant was in power by our votes, and going over 
to do our work, I was obliged to reply : " I wish 
him all sorts of good luck ; but, both for his sake 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 197 

and for mine, the wider berth we give one another 
the better," Mr. Summers had, however, news 
which interested me nearer. He told me he was 
himself crossing on a visit to Galtee Castle, of all 
places in the world ; and he told me that the heirs 
of Mr. Nathaniel Buckley had grown fully alive to 
the wrongs and mutual misunderstandings of the 
old conflict, and that they were about to turn the 
tenantry of the Galtees into peasant proprietors 
upon the most generous terms. As a matter of 
fact, when I heard of "the Galtee people" last, 
they were the owners of their own homes for ever, 
they were delving, subsoiling, and reclaiming with 
joyous hearts, the extra-police hut was gone, and 
the bailiff as extinct as the wolf, and the Buckley 
family lived in Galtee Castle, happy and diffusing 
happiness among their neighbours, in no more 
danger of the flash of a blunderbuss than of the 
neighbouring peak of Galteemore bursting out into 
a volcanic eruption. 

There is one other public event of 1878 which 
will remain stamped ineffaceably on my memory. 
It is my first hour of intimate relationship with 
Parnell. I had already seen him at public meetings, 
and by the light of Ronayne's hint, had easily 
enough come to discern signs of firmness and great- 
ness under the modest exterior of a Methodist 
minister on his first circuit. I was now to pass, 
for the first time, beyond the outer envelope of the 
man. It will, perhaps, be found most interesting 



198 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

to give my earliest impressions as they were freshly 
gathered, in a couple of entries in my journal, 
which I had commenced again to keep in this year 
of 1878, after nearly four years' intermission : — 

Nov. i$th. Routed out at seven this morning to go 
to Tralee with Parnell and his fiery cross. Joined him in 
the same carriage from Mallow, and had three hours' 
astonishingly confidential chat. Coldish reception in 
Tralee, but no colder than public feeling everywhere 
about everything just now. Met many old revolutionary 
and semi-revolutionary friends — Harrington, Mick Power, 
John Kelly, etc. etc. — and had a cheery all-night sitting 
at Benners' until four. P. mostly silent, but all alive. 

Nov. i6th. Parnell addressed a rough-and-tumble 
meeting, half farmers, half Fenians, with several tipsy 
interrupters and a preliminary alarm that the floor was 
giving way. He spoke under cruel difficulties, but fired 
them all before he sat down. The country is with him, 
in a half-hearted way, so far as it has any heart in 
anything. 

Nov. lyth. Returned by night-mail, and had endless 
delightful glimpses of P. and of the real man. First, 
alone in the train from Tralee, then for three hours in 
Mallow, and then all night long as we travelled up. He 
has captured me, heart and soul, and is bound to go on 
capturing. A sweet seriousness au fond, any amount of 
nervous courage, a delicate reserve, without the smallest 
suspicion of hauteur ; strangest of all, humour ; above 
everything else, simplicity ; as quietly at home with the 
girls in Mallow as with his turbulent audience in Tralee. 
We exchanged no end of confidences. As romantic as 
Lord Edward, but not to be shaken from prosier methods. 
In any case a man one could suffer with proudly. 

Unluckily, I did not commit our conversation to 
writing in detail ; but this first self-revelation of a 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 199 

man who passes for one of the most enigmatic of 
mankind, yielded me an extraordinarily rich harvest 
of impressions which, in the course of more than 
twenty years' intimate experience, I never found 
reason to change. A few of his opinions and 
observations are unforgettable. He was immensely 
interested in my experiences of the difficulties of 
importing arms or preparing for an insurrection. 
It was quite clear that his only objection to insur- 
rection was its impracticability. "In '98," he said, 
" the Wexfordman's pike, in the hands of a strong 
man, was a better weapon than the redcoat's gun. 
He could only fire it two or three times in a battle, 
and he always fired it in a flurry. Nothing could 
stop a bold pikesman. They might have cleared 
out the English in '98, even without the French, 
if all the counties had done as well as Wexford. 
But that is the trouble of a long-drawn conspiracy 
in Ireland. The best men got all shut up, and, 
when the time came, the only solid fight made was 
made by Wexford, where there was no conspiracy 
at all." 

But since then the situation was wholly changed, 
as against armed rebellion, by the improvements 
in firearms (always with him a subject of intense 
scientific interest), and by the revolution in the 
proportional population of the two countries. " Ire- 
land," he said, " is too small a country for a rebellion. 
There is not room enough to run away." There 
is, perhaps, a spice of his own pungent humour in 



200 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the remark ; but he argued it out as one of the deep 
truths of Irish public policy. "Washington," he 
said, "saved America by running away. If he had 
been fighting in Ireland, he would have been brought 
to a surrender in six weeks. Nowadays, with the 
railways, England could sweep the country from 
Cork to Donegal in six days." He was always 
specially proud of the fight Michael Dwyer and his 
band of outlaws made in the Wicklow Mountains, 
after the Wexford Insurrection was crushed. He 
knew all Dwyer's haunts in the hills, and more 
than hinted that his own great ancestor, Sir John 
Parnell, who lived in the midst of the insurgent 
country, was denounced to Dublin Castle as one 
in secret correspondence with the rebels. Curiously 
enough, the shooting-lodge at Aughavanagh, in 
which Parnell yearly spent the grouse season, was 
a military barrack erected for the extirpation of the 
rebel chief from the Wicklow Mountains. 

Dearly as Parnell loved to coquet with the 
romance of Irish rebellion, his positive spirit stuck, 
with characteristic tenacity, to the duller but more 
effective system of warfare he was himself bringing 
into practice. The only remark of his which grated 
upon me was his young man's impatience with 
Isaac Butt. " Mr. Butt," he said, with one of his 
softly satirical smiles, "is a Professor." No doubt 
he laid his finger on the weak spot in Butt's 
Parliamentary strategy. He spoke with the eleva- 
tion of thought and the veneration for Parliamentary 



IX THE 'FREEMAN'S JOURNAL' 201 

institutions of the old Trinity College lecturer on 
Constitutional Law. The House of Commons 
listened comfortably, and went to sleep. Mr. 
Biggar, espying strangers and turning the Prince 
of Wales out of the Gallery, did more to convince 
the inert Parliamentary intelligence that there was 
a bitter Irish question than all Butt's genius. 
"The first thing you've got to do with an English- 
man on the Irish question is to shock him," Parnell 
said. "Then you can reason with him right 
enough." 

I remarked on the apathy of the country, as 
evinced by his somewhat discouraging experiences 
in Tralee. " We have not nearly so good an 
audience in the House of Commons," he said, with 
a smile. He was in no wise dismayed for the 
future. He was, even then, keenly alive to the 
growth of foreign competition and its inevitable 
effect in pulling down the high prices which had 
hitherto averted a collapse of the Irish land system. 
" If we can bring the extreme men and the farmers 
to understand one another, we can do anything in 
that House of Commons." One other characteristic 
remark, as a revelation of his attitude of mind 
towards his own landowning class, particularly 
struck me. We were taking tea with some lady 
friends of mine in Mallow, and Parnell discovered 
a great interest in the Duhallow hunt, whose head- 
quarters were in Mallow, and a minute knowledge 
of the district as a hunting country. "Yes," said 



202 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, ix 

he, "the Duhallows are a fine pack. The only 
good things the Irish landlords have to show for 
themselves are their hounds and, perhaps " — 
he added — " in the Roscommon country, their 
horses." 



CHAPTER X 

DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 
1878-1880 

When I returned from Tralee at five o'clock in the 
morning, I found that my mother and two brothers 
had sat up all night by the bedside of my sister, 
whom the doctor pronounced to be dying. The 
watchers were themselves scarcely less spectral. 
My brothers were both of them racked by a cough 
that had something of the sound of a death-bell. 
On December 5th there is a note : 

Poor Jim had to come home from business, I fear 
never to return. He is a mere shell. As a last chance, 
I will send him to the South of France. Sat over the 
fire half the night brooding over the fate before us. 

It was too late for the journey to France, or for any 

journey except to the grave. He had held out while 

a remnant of his magnificent strength lasted, and once 

he sank on his bed he never quitted it. My poor 

Dick also did the watching by his sister's side until 

two or three days before his own death. To make 

matters worse, the winter was one of the fiercest on 

record — a regular orgy of snowstorms and murder- 

203 



204 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

ous east winds — and my own cough began to be added 
to the dismal chorus that resounded from every room 
in the house, for in every room there was an invaHd. 
A few entries will help to explain why the events 
of that December filled my memory for many years 
to come with horror : — 

Dec. yth. Saw Sir Dominic/ who shook his head, but 
told me to be brave was my best physic. Warned me to 
keep within doors. His own courage, writhing under the 
gout, did really shame me, but more than all the courage 
in our poor home, where there is never a word of com- 
plaint, with all the coughs and suffering. M. worse and 
worse — only kept alive for last few days by small doses of 
milk and champagne. 

Dec. I ith. M. and J. sinking every hour. Snow and 
cold frightful. Poor Dick also is yielding at last. Father 
Ryan with my brothers ; so sweet and good. The wound 
in my own lung makes the world seem so strange. 

Dec. I ith. Wound in lung will not be shaken off. 
Still imprisoned within, listening day and night to the 
coughs, and in some curious way relieved by joining in. 
My poor mother does all the work of our hospital house- 
hold, as ill herself as any. M'Weeney presses me to 
take refuge at his place. It is not altogether through 
courage I refuse. 

And then the two brief records : 

Dec. i/^th. My brave Jim died at 4.30. 
Dec. i^th. My poor, poor Dick went to heaven 
during the night. A night that will for ever haunt me. 

^ The distinguished Dubhn physician, Sir Dominic Corrigan, 
Bart., whose kindness to me in these trying times passes descrip- 
tion. Whenever I proffered him a bank-note he would thrust it 
back into my pocket with, " Keep it till you are rich, and I am in a 
hospital for incurables." 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 205 

My elder brother passed away peacefully in the 
afternoon, murmuring something about the Mallow 
Bridge and the rifles. The friends who came to 
sit up with us through the night, having satisfied 
themselves that there was no immediate danger of 
any other calamity, saw that the truest kindness 
would be to permit my mother to have some sleep, 
and left us alone towards one o'clock in the morn- 
ing. Our servant, I grieve to say, perhaps as a 
consequence of over - watching, had become the 
worse of liquor, and had been quietly removed from 
the house by a friend. I stretched myself on the 
sofa in the sitting-room, the only room in the house 
where there was not somebody dying or dead, and 
tried to sleep. One familiar cough was now missing 
from the chorus. The others still from time to 
time broke through the silence of the house of 
death, but not in any specially alarming way, and my 
mother had mercifully fallen into a deep sleep after 
her long watchings. About two hours afterwards, 
I was awakened from a half-sleep by a particularly 
violent explosion of coughing from the room where 
my younger brother was lying. The coughing 
culminated in an awful hollow sigh, which sounds as 
distinctly in my memory now, more than a quarter 
of a century after, as it did on that dreadful night. 
Then there came a silence, more terrifying a 
thousand times than the coughing. I would have 
given anything to hear the well-known cough again. 

There was no doubting what had happened. I 



2o6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

was afraid even to light the candle, for fear of 
arousing my mother, and perhaps precipitating 
another tragedy. I crept in the dark to my younger 
brother's room and listened intently for his breath- 
ing. Then I groped my way towards his bed, and 
placed my hand on his face. It was already cold. 
It was too late to give my mother any consolation 
by awakening her, and there was always the fear of 
the effect on my poor sister, whose cough alone now 
broke the stillness, save for an occasional attack of 
my own. I sat on the bed in the dark, with the 
dead, until the daylight, which it seemed never 
would come, and then, as I heard my mother move, 
went in to warn her not to frighten my sister. 
From that hour the overwhelming sadness of 
human life has never quitted me. If my hair had 
not grown white when I looked in the glass, it 
was certainly another man, and a sad one, I saw 
there. 

Dec. 2 I St. Back again at business. House so lonely. 
How I long to hear again the coughs that are silenced ! 
Maggie only awaiting God's time, so sweetly. Poor Jim! 
A stouter-hearted foe of England never breathed, nor yet 
a kinder heart. If ever I write an affecting story it will 
be the story of his broken life. But I feel my poor 
Dick's loss most of all. He clung to me like ivy, and I 
do believe the strongest image on his guileless heart was 
mine. Though he was twenty-two, he looked in his coffin 
like a child of fourteen who had fallen asleep. May a 
good God be kind to them ! 

My sister struggled along for more than a fort- 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 207 

night more. She would insist on my raising the blind 
to let her see the two hearses and the two coffins 
which were the last she saw on earth of those who 
were gone before her. 

Dec. 2^th. Christmas Day. M. at death's doors. 
Father Ryan thinks she will hardly live through the 
night ; mother is worn to a shadow ; myself in an un- 
healthy perspiration, following the same frightful round of 
symptoms. Had my Christmas dinner off a fowl sent in 
cooked by Mrs. Danne. Nobody here to cook — soon, 
perhaps, nobody to cook for. Another outburst from 
poor Maggie's room. Dread each cough of hers may be 
the last. 

It was not until the night of the 5th of January 
that her long martyrdom ended in a peace that 
already whispered of heaven. As though I had 
not supped full of horrors, the morning after my 
sister's death, the distracted old mother of a brother 
pressman called to tell me her son had died in a 
small-pox hospital, and that she had no other friend 
left in the world to arrange for his funeral. On the 
morning on which my sister was buried I had to 
repair, with another faithful friend, to the Hardwicke 
Small-pox Hospital to bury my old Press comrade, 
his poor mother forming, with the two of us, the 
entire funeral procession, for the panic caused by 
the small-pox epidemic was general ; and the old 
lady, standing alone in her weeds by the small-pox 
shed, silently rebuked me with the reminder that 
there was somebody in the world even more 
desolate than myself. 



2o8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

If the details of a private grief are related with 
so much particularity, it is because this tragic 
episode coloured my whole life and character, and 
explains the recklessness (for it was not calm 
courage) with which I was afterwards accustomed 
to encounter personal danger, and which, perhaps, 
alone made me in any degree a formidable element 
in a semi-revolutionary movement. From that time 
forth my feeling was that of one five out of six 
parts of whose being were already in another world, 
and as to whom it mattered excessively little to any 
one how soon the remaining fraction might follow. 
But time was to prove that it is as true of Death 
as Plato held it to be of Fame, that it flies the 
pursuer, and pursues the flier. As usual, I turned 
to my pen for consolation, and before the end 
of January had drafted the opening chapters of 
a contemporary Irish novel, entitled The Lord 
Harry} My friend Hooper, to whom I sub- 
mitted them, gave a discouraging judgment, 
whose worldly sagacity was even then sufficiently 
obvious. 

" ' For God's sake,' " my note runs, " ' whatever you 
write, don't touch politics, and don't offend the priests.' 
' But, my dear fellow,' I said, ' in Ireland not to touch 
politics is not to touch life ; and as to the priests, it 
is just because I love them and would double their 



1 A first Sbauche of that which was published ten years after- 
wards as When we were Boys, the other title having been appro- 
priated in the meantime by an English dramatist. 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 209 

influence for good, that I am not afraid to tell them 
how they cut the young Irish soul in two when 
they set up any antagonism between Religion and 
Nationality.' 

" ' Don't be a Don Quixote,' was his reply. ' Never 
try to alter anything in Ireland, or you will suffer for it.' 
He is right. The only safe Irish policy is — Kismet ! 1 
feel like a man entering a vault strewn with the bones of 
a thousand failures. But que voulez-vous ? Be it infatua- 
tion or no, I feel I have before my mind's eye something 
that would be new and would conciliate sympathy for 
Ireland, even in the ranks of Tuscany, had I only six 
months of peace and health to try to realise it. It is the 
only legacy I have to leave." 

The few opening chapters, however, went no 
further. They were lost, and the idea never re- 
turned until it took shape in Galway Jail ten years 
subsequently. The truth is, during this awful 
winter I crept through the streets of Dublin more 
dead than alive, with the feeling that the east wind 
was prowling around the corners with a weapon as 
sharp as a murderer's knife, and I grew less and 
less inclined to make any resistance. Sir Dominic 
Corrigan alone stimulated me to show fight. " If 
you stay here six weeks longer," he said, " my 
business with you will be over; but if you make 
the sea-trip to Egypt I mark out for you, you will 
come back a new man." I suppose I must have 
suggested some despondent doubt whether it would 
be worth the trouble and the expense. " Are you 
afraid you are going to die .'^ " he asked, his eyes 
piercing me through as searchingly as the X-rays 



2IO WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

of a later day. " Well, no, sir, I don't think I am 
very much afraid." — "Very well, then you won't!" 
he growled ; and, such miracle-workers may a glance 
or a word from genius be, I went away to Egypt 
with the perfect confidence that there was one 
stronger than Death who had passed his word that 
I was to go scatheless. 

The ravishing Mediterranean cruise and the 
desert air of Egypt, vivifying as dry champagne, 
did indeed come upon me with something of the 
delights of an opening Paradise for one slain by the 
east winds of Dublin ; and I have never since 
ceased to regard Egypt as my second country, a 
second Oriental mother, in whose mysterious eyes, 
however, there was missing the magic something of 
the two plaintive Irish eyes far away in the western 
mists. It was my fortune to make this Eastern 
journey, as it was to make my first visit to all the 
great cities of the old world — to Dublin, to London, 
to Cairo, to Naples, to Rome, and to Paris — all 
alone, more companionless even than Childe Harold, 
who at least roamed these self-same deep blue seas 
with his page and his stout yeoman at call. The 
loneliness only enabled me to take in deeper 
draughts of the romance with which the bare names 
of the places I glided by in a delicious dream 
intoxicated me — the golden land of Spain, Gibraltar, 
the old nest of the Algerines, the Cathedral-graves 
of the Maltese Knights, Alexandria, with its soft 
whispers of Cleopatra, the bazaars of Cairo, still 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 211 

alive with the wildest colours of the Arabian Nights, 
the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and their innumer- 
able centuries, the everlasting grey desert around 
Helouan, Naples, Elba, Marseilles, and — to wind 
up with — my first dazzled glimpse of Paris, still 
scarred with the wounds of the Terrible Year, 
but, to my unaccustomed gaze, such a scene of 
magnificence, of enchantment, of elegance, of 
sparkle of mind and lights and mirrors, as seemed 
the apotheosis of the glittering nineteenth century, 
and yet sent me back dreaming regretfully of the 
shadowy ruins and mysterious silences of the East. 

On May 12th, on board the Messagerie boat at 
Naples, I bought an English paper which contained 
the announcement that a new writ had been moved 
for Limerick City " in the room of Isaac Butt, 
deceased." He died of a broken heart, the 
endemic malady of Irish leaders before and after 
him. Fate closed in on him, act after act, with the 
dread certainty of a play of Euripides. Whatever 
loose bond of discipline held his group of Whig 
place - beggars and Tory landlords together, under 
his own mild constitutional rule, was wholly broken 
when Parnell arose with a programme which invited 
Home Rule squires, like Colonel King-Harman, to 
abolish Landlordism, and Home Rule lawyers to 
make war against all English parties and govern- 
ments in a deadly earnest which would put an end 
to all hope of a quiet life or a respectable preferment. 
There was no organised popular force at Butt's 



212 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

back. The attempts to relieve his embarrassments 
by a national tribute yielded somewhat pitiful 
results. The finances of his Home Rule League 
were at so low an ebb that I remember its Secre- 
tary, who was attending a Waterford meeting, 
was obliged to go about collecting the outstanding 
subscriptions of local members, in order to defray 
the expenses of his return to Dublin. So little had 
selfish interest to do with Butt's financial straits, I 
believe there is no doubt that he might have had the 
Irish Chief Justiceship at the moment when he was 
being pursued by bailiffs for paltry judgment debts. 
Of two mournful stages of his downfall I was 
a personal witness as a pressman. The first was 
when, at a Convention in Liverpool, the Home 
Rule League of Great Britain (of which he was 
the founder) deposed him from the presidency 
and put Parnell in his place. " I remember so well 
the cheery face of the splendid old gentleman as he 
afterwards sat at dinner at the Adelphi Hotel with 
the men who had defeated him, and chatted gaily 
with them. I remember also the pathetic close of 
that dinner when the lost leader departed alone to 
catch the train for London, while the new men 
were preparing for a great evening demonstration 
in some large public hall, in celebration of their 
triumph." One other scene — the last in which I 
saw him — lingers sadly in my memory. It was the 
final tussle in the Home Rule League, in the Moles- 
worth Street Hall in Dublin, when Butt was for the 



DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 213 

first time virtually beaten, after a six hours' debate, 
by Messrs. Parnell, Biggar, and Dillon. Who that 
heard him can ever forget the bowed and broken old 
man's heart-breaking appeal to give him back again 
the days when he had a united country behind him } 
Ireland is woefully rich in such tragedies. The 
process by which Mr. Parnell, in his last tragic days, 
went through a similar ordeal, in his turn, was not 
more pitiful in substance, though it was coarser in 
the manner of execution. Those who deposed Mr. 
Butt were absolutely and inevitably in the right, 
but the pity of it ! — the stooped shoulders, the genial 
old face, the vast, arched forehead, with the rings 
of silver hair tossing about it, the voice in which 
you heard the last rattle of dying genius ! 

This was on February 3rd, 1879, and on February 
24th my journal contains this entry : " Poor Butt is 
dying. In Ireland a man has to die to be a hero; 
yet it is neither Ireland's fault nor his if the tragedy 
ends as a tragedy should." And on March 13th: 
" Poor Butt has been unmercifully spared. Had 
he died now, there had been a royal burial and a 
National provision for his family. Who will answer, 
even for this much, a year hence ? " The gloomy 
anticipation was indeed justified. He was buried 
quiedy in the graveyard of his native village of 
Stranorlar, in distant Donegal, and by the time I 
got home to Ireland the country was in the first 
throes of a Revolution, amidst which Butt's states- 
manlike counsels of perfection and dark struggles 



214 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

with Destiny were soon forgotten. But the Irish 
understanding is as sure in the long run to arrive at 
the right conclusion as the Irish heart. The days 
for the full recognition of Butt's genius will come, if 
they have not come already. 

The fault of his failure, as above remarked, was 
neither his country's nor his own. Not his own ; 
for he laid the foundations on which all the men 
who followed him have built. It was he who dis- 
covered the power of an organised Irish electorate 
in Great Britain. He laid down the broad lines 
of a National University, which no man since has 
improved upon. He first projected a separate and 
independent Irish Parliamentary Party, although 
he failed to command the right material, or to draw 
the bonds of discipline sufficiently tight. Finally, 
he first preconised that triple union of a conciliated 
Protestant minority, of Fenian self-sacrifice, and of 
an enfranchised peasantry, upon which any really 
statesmanlike fabric of Irish Nationality must rest ; 
only the masses of the extreme men were still cold, 
and the Land question made antagonism between the 
landed men and the people a necessity of life on both 
sides. The time was not yet come when the Land 
Conference of 1903 could base themselves on a state 
of things in which the moneyed interest, as well as 
the political power and amenities of life, of the Irish 
gentry could be made to depend upon their identi- 
fication with the Nationalist masses and their Cause. 

Neither is the country to be taxed with in- 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 215 

gratitude, on the other hand, for exchanging a 
leader who was only great in design for a leader 
whose genius lay in action. It ought to be one of 
the gravest self-reproaches of thoughtful English- 
men that Butt's capital mistake was in trusting to 
the force of reasoning and eloquent appeal upon 
the English Parliament. He addressed them with 
the tongue of "a damaged Archangel" on behalf 
of a peaceful country, and at the head of a most 
civil-spoken Party, and he accomplished absolutely 
nothing. Parnell and Biggar came along with their 
dull, indomitable genius for being disagreeable, and 
with a revolution swelling in behind them, and both 
English parties promptly recognised there was an 
Irish question and did them homage. The phrase 
*• The Policy of Exasperation," which, to Butt's fine 
constitutional mind, seemed the heaviest reproach 
he could level against Parnell's methods, was the 
description of all others which recommended it to 
the Irish race, for it was the only policy which could 
induce English statesmen to listen. It was English 
unwisdom which killed Butt, and killed the Policy 
of Moderation with him, and gave to the Policy of 
Exasperation a complete vindication and a long 
career of resounding triumph. 

Calling into the House of Commons the evening 
of my return to London, on May 22nd, I was told 
by Mr. O'Connor Power that he had just been 
attending a meeting of his constituents at the village 
of Irishtown, in the county of Mayo, which would 



2i6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, 

make history. The whole country-side had flocked 
together, as at a word of command, including horse- 
men enough to form a regiment of cavalry, and Mr. 
Power, who had sounded all the subterranean depths 
of Irish disaffection, spoke very solemnly of what 
was coming. It was the first whisper I heard of 
the Land League movement, although even the 
name was not yet invented. There was nothing 
new in the objects. Peasant proprietary, in sub- 
stitution for Landlordism, was already firmly em- 
bedded in the popular programme, and during the 
preceding year many meetings in different parts of 
the country with this object had been addressed by 
Mr. Parnell and his lieutenants, under the influence 
of the alarm caused by two disastrous years for 
agriculture, and the rising spirit evoked by the 
obstructives' triumphant defiance of Parliamentary 
law and order. The real change wrought by the 
Land League was that it supplied to Parnell the 
tremendous dynamic force for which Butt had 
appealed in vain at Hood's Hotel ten years before, 
in days when public spirit was completely broken. 
Nearly all the most potent men in the old revolu- 
tionary movement were won over not merely to 
tolerate, but sincerely to co-operate in the attempt 
to try what a courageous passive resistance could do 
where arms had failed, and the most simple-minded 
patriotic spirit was thus allied with the most power- 
ful of all material motives — a struggle for the land 
of Ireland — in an agricultural crisis which conjured 



DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 217 

up the terrors of eviction in half the homes of the 
country, and forced more than half a million of the 
people to fight for their very lives against mere 
hunger. The force of Obstruction in the House of 
Commons was in this way supplemented by vaster 
and more insuppressible elements of resistance in 
Ireland. 

For this accession to the national strength two 
remarkable men — Mr. Michael Davitt and Mr. 
John Devoy — are mainly to be thanked. The 
fact that he was himself the son of a County Mayo 
tenant cruelly evicted, his long years of suffering 
in penal servitude for Ireland, his picturesque and 
soldierly one-armed figure, were in themselves suffi- 
cient to give Mr. Davitt a secure place in the popular 
heart. His theories of Land Reform, if lacking in 
precision, were broad-minded and generous, inasmuch 
as they seemed to promise advantages to the whole 
community and not merely to those in actual occupa- 
tion of land. It is one other of the reproaches that 
ought to weigh upon the English conscience, that 
Mr. Davitt's dreary term of prison torments was 
spent not in elaborating schemes of vengeance 
against England, but in indulging dreams of a 
cordial union with the English democracy, even in 
days before the English democracy had given any 
tangible proof of a reciprocal spirit towards Irish 
Nationalists ; and that, nevertheless, the English 
statesmanship, which ought to have hailed such a 
spirit with a corresponding generosity, only sue- 



2i8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

ceeded in driving Mr. Davitt many years after to 
throw up his seat in the EngHsh ParHament, in 
despair of obtaining justice by pacific methods. 

The part played by his co-founder of the Land 
League movement, Mr. Devoy, is less known, 
because the terms on which he was amnestied 
forbade him to return to Ireland,^ and consequently 
exposed him to misunderstandings of the situation at 
home, which eventually made him a bitter enemy of 
the semi-parliamentary, semi-agrarian revolution he 
had so influential a part in launching. His hostility 
in later days, however, ought not to make us forget- 
ful of the sagacity and courage with which he first 
rallied even the extremest of the extreme men to 
give a full and fair trial to Parnell and his methods. 
Mr. Devoy was a born conspirator, and, like all 
born conspirators, can never be measured at his 
true value by the public. But it is certain that, in 
his own special department of swearing into the 
Revolutionary Brotherhood the soldiers of the 
Dublin Garrison, in 1865, he was perhaps the 
most dangerous enemy of England in the entire 
Fenian body, and, in some respects, not altogether 
unworthy to rank not very far beneath Wolfe Tone. 
It is equally sure that his public letters, in 1878-79, 
foreshadowing the Land League Revolution, and 
basing it upon the principle suggested by his famous 

1 It is, nevertheless, certain that Mr. Devoy secretly visited the 
West of Ireland on the eve of the formation of the Land League, and 
doubtless set the occult machinery going which was soon to make its 
work visible in the Land League meetings. 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 219 

metaphor of " employing the Land question as the 
engine to drag Home Rule," reveal a keen political 
insight, and had a profound effect even on the fiercest 
of the fanatics with whom " Parliamentary agitation " 
spelt Ichabod. His metaphor did not mean, as the 
Twies used once absurdly to argue, that the Irish 
farmers, that is to say, the bulk of the Irish popula- 
tion, had no interest in Home Rule for its own sake. 
It only meant that the Land question, being a daily 
and hourly question of mere existence, was the more 
urgent question of the two, even as breath in his 
lungs is of more importance to a dying man than 
his status in society. If, in fighting the landlords, 
the Irish people were also fighting the English 
garrison and the English Government with the most 
effectual weapons at their disposal, that was only to 
combat English rule through its own worst product, 
and to combat it without the bloody reprisals by 
which the landlords of France were made to expiate 
a less barbarous oppression. 

These pages have no pretension to be a history 
of our times. They aim at nothing beyond record- 
ing incidents of which I have some personal cogni- 
sance, so far, indeed, as they are written at all with 
any greater reference to the opinion of the outer 
public than were the Poetical Works and the 
manuscript newspaper of my boyish hours. It is 
not possible, therefore, to enter here into the differ- 
ences of standpoint from which Mr. Davitt and Mr. 
Devoy viewed the agrarian movement, or the 



220 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

differences which separated them both from Mr. 
Parnell. It is possible that Mr, Devoy never 
relinquished his dream of an ultimate Irish Re- 
public, as it is quite certain that Parnell no more 
demanded that he should make any such abjuration 
than he would have been willing himself to sur- 
render his own clear judgment as to the future at 
the demand of Mr. Devoy. Where Mr. Davitt and 
Mr. Devoy were in perfect accord was that it was 
the first and most patriotic duty of the men who 
had before risked their lives on the battlefield 
or in penal cells to throw themselves with equal 
fervour into Parnell's war for the achievement of 
National Self-Government, and the Abolition of 
Landlordism by the means which the British Con- 
stitution left in his hands. It had happened often 
enough that Irishmen, who began as Reformers, 
were goaded into Rebellion. It was the first time 
that Irishmen, who began as Rebels, were trans- 
formed into Reformers. Could the force of inepti- 
tude further go than that such a transformation, 
which might have yielded immeasurable advantages 
to England, and was, perhaps, the most striking 
evidence of Parnell's genius for canalising the way- 
ward forces of Irish disaffection, should be for many 
years cast up to him in England as a reproach, if 
not a crime ? 

We were still, however, far from the times when 
it was worth while debating whether a Policy of 
Conciliation could be honestly accepted by Ireland. 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 221 

Conciliation had first to be offered by England, and 
as yet no English statesman had even contemplated 
the possibility of concession on either of the two 
vital points of a National Parliament or the expro- 
priation of the landlords. Both Parliament men 
and landlords had first to be shaken with something 
of the rudeness of an earthquake shock out of their 
comfortable persuasion that there was no longer an 
Irish difficulty worth wasting a thought upon. We 
were even many months before the Land League 
movement itself obtained the slightest hold on the 
country. 

On my return from Egypt, I found that the Irish- 
town meeting, and the two or three other Mayo 
meetings which followed it, had attracted little or 
no attention, and had been, indeed, only reported 
in the meagrest form by the Freeman. The Irish 
Party, after Butt's death, had fallen into the most 
dilapidated condition. Parnell and his lieutenants 
alone evoked any spark of enthusiasm in Ireland, 
by the cold pertinacity with which they picked to 
pieces the most venerable traditions of English con- 
stitutional life, and the contempt with which they 
treated the outcries of the writhing friends of 
Parliamentary institutions. But they were still a 
small group, without money, and even without any 
popular organisation at their back. The mass of 
the Irish members were more or less virulently 
against them ; so was the remnant of Butt's Home 
Rule League ; so was the principal Nationalist 



222 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

newspaper in the country, whenever a favourable 
opportunity offered for planting a cautious dart in 
some weak point. 

In the July of 1879 the two sections of the Irish 
Party came to issue at the Ennis election, where 
Mr. William O'Brien, Q.C., the moderate Home 
Ruler and future placeman, was supported by Mr. 
Gray and the Freeman, and by a majority of the 
Home Rule League Council, and opposed with 
characteristic resoluteness by Mr. Parnell. He 
suddenly arrived in the borough with his candidate, 
James Lysaght Finegan, an unknown journalist, 
with no recommendation whatever except that of 
a gallant soldier and an Irish Nationalist, ready to 
follow the flag into any post of danger. Parnell 
carried his man to the head of the poll, to the 
astoundment of all the influential, financial, Parlia- 
mentary, clerical, and journalistic supporters of the 
future judge. 

The quarrel between Parnell and Gray, which 
was accentuated by the Ennis election, was still 
further embittered by a public declaration of Gray 
that, in the division lobby of the House of Com- 
mons, Parnell had stigmatised his colleagues, who 
deserted him on the Irish University question, as 
" Papist Rats." The result was an acrid news- 
paper controversy, some of the Irish members 
attesting that they had heard him use the offen- 
sive phrase, and others repelling the accusation as 
an attempt to arouse religious prejudice against 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 223 

a Protestant Patriot. The truth seems to have 
been that the word " rats " was assuredly used, but 
that Gray was mistaken in thinking he had heard 
the epithet " Papist." Parnell was not a man of 
adjectives, and had not a tinge of the coarse bigotry 
in which such insults find their inspiration. His 
observation, whatever it was, was indeed intended 
to be heard by his own intimate comrades in obstruc- 
tion, who were " Papists " themselves, and who 
would have resented any offence to Catholicism as 
fiercely as the individuals he was denouncing. The 
personal conflict was terminated by the good offices 
of the Archbishop of Cashel, who loved the two 
great Irishmen equally well, and privately effected 
a reconciliation, which was never afterwards in any 
danger of being undone. But the affair had excited 
popular suspicion of Gray and the Freeman to an 
alarming pitch. He determined to wipe out the 
memory of the " Papist Rats " controversy by one 
of those striking newspaper coups for which he had 
a Napoleonic genius. Hints had reached him that 
famine and revolution were impending in the west ; 
but Mr. "Jimmy" Lowther,^ the Chief Secretary, 
scoffed at every suggestion of any general distress, 
and the reports of the three obscure meetings at 
Irishtown, Westport, and Milltown had given the 



1 Mr. Lowther declared in Parliament on May 27th, 1879, "He 
was glad to think that the depression in Irish agriculture, although 
undoubted, was neither so prevalent nor so acute as the depression 
existing in other parts of the United Kingdom." 



224 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

country in general no indication that a movement 
of any magnitude was gathering behind them. The 
first considerable task laid upon me when I returned 
home was to undertake a special commission to the 
west to ascertain the truth. Gray made no disguise 
how much depended for himself and his paper, as 
well as for the country, upon my mission. He left 
me free to proclaim the truth at any risk to himself 
or the paper. 

A few extracts from my journal may give the 
best glimpse of my discoveries : — 

Au£: 2ist. Came away to Castlebar with an abject 
terror of my task, and of E. D. G.'s very exaggerated 
notions of my power to fight down the rising storm of 
unpopularity. It is always when I expect most I can do 
least. If I were only equally sure of the converse ! — 
3 o'clock. Missed James Daly, who is the storm-centre 
of the agitation. Made out parish priest. Canon M'Gee, 
who at first shivered at Daly's name and looked reserved, 
but when we sat down to talk, turned out most kind and 
cordial and modest and good. . . . Nothing but destruc- 
tion threatening all round ; famine and eviction before 
the people ; neither landlords nor Government have an 
atom of compassion, or even suspect what is coming. 
Does not like the agitators, but, for himself, does not 
know what else he can do for the people except pray to 
God for them. . . . Daly made me out later at the hotel 
and hailed the Press as a deliverer. " It is the first time 
they ever discovered the unfortunate County Mayo on the 
map of Ireland. They were never done talking of the 
famine pits of Skibbereen. because there was a smart 
local doctor who wrote them up." Two hundred thousand 
people died of hunger in Mayo, after living on nettles and 
asses' flesh, and the world never said as much as " God 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 225 

be merciful to them ! " A rough-spoken giant, with an 
inexhaustible fund of knowledge of the people and the 
quaintest mother-wit. Talked far into the night and told 
me stories of Mayo landlordism that followed me to bed 
like nightmares. 

Azi^. 22nd. Drove to Louisburgh and back, 54 
miles on an open car, under tempest of rain for greater 
part of road. For ten miles to Westport, a solitude of 
rich green land : whole population exterminated by Lord 
Lucan, their land let to Scotch graziers, and the boundary 
walls built of the ruins of their cabins. In Westport, 
shopkeepers' books, debts to make one think of universal 
bankruptcy as the only cure. Grand drive by borders 
of Clew Bay under Croagh Patrick.^ Found mob of 
wretches around Rent Office, crushed with debt and 
despair, and petitioning for an abatement of rent. Lord 
Sligo's agent as much amazed at their boldness as if the 
mountain sheep had taken up arms to invade him. Told 
them haughtily there could be no abatement. There 
was a voice : " Well, then, we'll keep a firm grip of our 
homesteads." It was Parnell's phrase at the Westport 
meeting a few weeks ago. The poor creatures trembled 
at the audacity of the Voice, and cast down their eyes to 
show it was not they. Dinner at home of Bishop Mac- 
Evil ly's mother, who saw the French in '98. She was 
flying from Killala in her father's car, when the " little 
men with the guns " jumped over the ditch and stopped 
them. Back after midnight, drenched with rain, but with 
no thought for anything except the extraordinary and 
horrible things I am hearing every hour. 

^ It was the first time I passed, all unconsciously, the house that 
was afterwards to become my home. The knowledge I then acquired 
of the people's pathetic helplessness, and their natural gentleness of 
character under all sorts of sordid and demoniacal cruelties on the 
part of their masters, came upon me with the force of a revelation, 
and has afforded me one of the deepest gratifications of my life, by 
helping to make me instrumental, in no matter how slight a degree, 
in brightening their lot. 

Q 



226 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Aao-, 2ird. Rummaging Poor Law books and shop- 
keepers' accounts with Canon M'Gee. News of arrival 
has spread Hke wildfire. Messengers from all directions 
begging me hither and thither. Head swimming with 
tales of misery. When I sat down to write towards 
midnight, was sorely tempted to break the pen and give 
up : the despair is catching. 

Aug. 24//A To Belcarra, Clogherlynch, Ballintubber, 
etc., in torrents of rain. Air sick with the rotten smell 
of the potato-blight. Day after day nothing but light- 
ning and rain to spread the havoc. Met some very 
desperate people under sentence of eviction, at Clogher- 
lynch, with a fixed look that frightened one. They say 
they have but one life to lose, and better death by gun- 
shot than by slow starvation. They mean it. 

Aug. 26th. At Ballyhaunis; cattle down^i per beast 
at the fair. Droves of poor people haunting me, to listen 
to whom is misery. Famine, nothing less, is writ large 
over the country ; but the Chief Secretary has his joke, 
and the landlords won't abate a farthing, and shout down 
the cry of distress as all lying and acting. . . . To my 
terror, my letters are greedily caught up. This poor 
newspaper scribbler has actually become an important 
personage for the poor people. What a comment on 
their friendlessness and on their masters ! 

Experiences like the above, repeated from w^eek 
to v^eek all over the provinces of Connaught 
and Munster during the six succeeding months, and 
proceeding not from vague generalisations, but 
from minute inquiries into the actual life -story of 
living men and women, from cabin to cabin, and 
from district to district, admitted me to a know- 
ledge of the Irish Land question which could not 
well go deeper. They have left upon all my after 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 227 

life an indelible impression, amounting almost to 
an obsession, as to the wickedness of the Irish 
Landlord System as a means of discouraging all 
thought of energy or improvement in the country 
and inflicting unimaginable cruelties on the poor 
and weak. From that time forth the extirpation 
of that system seemed an object worthy of any 
sacrifice, and containing in itself its own rich 
reward. 

What, perhaps, was the most hateful discovery 
of all was that the poorer the land and the meeker 
the tenant, the more merciless was his rent, and the 
more diabolical the oppression practised upon him. 
In the richer parts of the country, the system bred 
special evils of its own ; but the Tipperary peasant 
living on a generous soil often paid little more than 
half the sum per acre that was extorted from the 
small holder of Mayo for the acre or two of similar 
quality which might be found, like an oasis, amidst 
the rocks and swamps which made up the rest of 
his holding. The grim Tipperary man was treated 
with deference in the Rent Office, even when in 
arrear ; and actual eviction was not ventured upon 
except in extreme cases. The little mountainy-man 
of Mayo was habitually treated by his superiors with 
less ceremony than he treated his own ass, and being 
all his life a gale or two in arrears incurred in some 
old famine -time, was every other year writted in 
the Courts, distrained, or evicted, in order to divide 
a rich harvest of law costs among the obscene tribe 



228 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

of bailiffs, process-servers, agents, and lawyers who 
battened upon his misery. 

A more cruel circumstance still, the poor western, 
evicted from the fertile lands which abound in 
Connaught, was more heavily rented per acre for 
the miserable mountain patch to which he was 
banished than the big grazier or gombeen-man, in 
whose interest he was driven from his own fields, 
was asked to pay for them. The poorer landlords 
held the poorest parts of the country, and the rents 
were fixed not according to the poverty of the 
land or of the tenant who reclaimed it, but accord- 
ing to the necessities of the landlord, who did 
nothing for the land except to rack-rent and mort- 
gage it. In the annals of human slavery there is 
no more pitiful figure than that of the hunger- 
stricken and debt -crushed peasant of the western 
half of Ireland bowing meekly under the whips of 
whole categories of cruel slave-drivers, from the 
haughty agent and the estate attorney with bowels 
of iron down to the brute who generally officiated 
as rent-warner and the gombeen-man, who exacted 
cent per cent for his supply of Indian meal, with 
the view of ultimately grabbing his debtor's holding. 
Those who are most genuinely shocked at the bar- 
barous forms of vengeance which sometimes, though 
rarely, marked the uprising of those slaves, when 
the terror of wholesale extermination and death by 
hunorer at last stirred the instincts of human nature 
in their blood, ought not to forget that if (as is the 



X DEATH AND A RESURRECTION 229 

case) there was not a single case of agrarian murder 
in Tipperary throughout the Land League agitation, 
it was because the olden reputation of Tipperary 
for stern resistance to oppression had made the 
Tipperary landlord a more cautious, if not more 
humane, practitioner ; and that, if rack-renting and 
legal cruelty had done their worst on Mayo in every 
form of heartlessness, it was very largely indeed 
because the poor fellaheen of the Nile or the niggers 
of Uncle Toms Cabin had never bent under the 
lash of their torturers with a gentler or more un- 
resisting spirit than these primitive Gaelic folk, 
forgotten by the world in their mists and mountains. 
Even while my inquiries were proceeding, there 
was yet no general organisation of the people. 
Clear-sighted landlords and a benignant Govern- 
ment might still have easily taken the lightnings 
out of the storm that was rising. The Mayo 
landlords' idea of wisdom was to meet the situation 
by a combination of the four strongest of them — 
Lord Sligo, Lord Lucan, Sir Roger Palmer, and Sir 
Robert Blosse Lynch — to refuse an abatement of 10 
per cent on the current rents, three months before 
the Land League was founded. The statecraft of 
the Government was to pass the word to their 
police officials to discredit my reports and laugh to 
scorn any fear of general distress, a few weeks 
before the Lord - Lieutenant and his wife were 
forced to appeal wildly to the world for subscriptions 
to avert a general famine. 



230 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, x 

A few dates will give the key to the history of 
Ireland for the next quarter of a century. In 
August 1879 the Mayo landlords formed their 
solemn league and covenant to deny even an abate- 
ment of 10 per cent to the tenants whose crops 
were rotting wholesale before their eyes, and whose 
cattle were unsaleable. In the same month of 
August Mr. James Lowther dismissed the stories of 
distress as fiction; on 21st October the Irish 
National Land League was founded in the Imperial 
Hotel, Dublin, under the presidency of Parnell ; on 
December i8th, the Duchess of Marlborough issued 
her appeal to the charity of the world to come to 
the relief of the imaginary distress ; on February 
6th, 1880, Mr. Lowther loaned ;^ 1,100,000 out of 
the Church Surplus Fund to the landlords (the last 
of his sardonic jokes as Chief Secretary), by way of 
starting relief works. The landlords kept their 10 
per cent and brought a Revolution hurtling about 
their ears. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 

One or two more extracts from my diary may be 
permissible here. The time is approaching when 
it will be no longer safe to commit one's thoughts to 
paper, and when there will come a gap of many 
years in my journalising. 

Nov. igth. A coup d'etat or an Ashanti bomb^ — 
which ? At six this morning, Daly, Davitt, and Killeen 
were taken out of their beds and carried off to Sligo Jail. 
Packed off by night mail train to interview them. 

Nov. 20th. Got into Sligo at 3.30 A.M., the only 
passenger, and beat for an hour at Imperial Hotel to 
wake a sleepy boots. Saw the prisoners, who are, as I 
anticipated, in exultant spirits. The jail -gate is the 
Triumphal Arch of Irish conquerors. They might have 
been speechifying for years without acquiring half the 
power the Castle people have given them. Something 
might be said for shooting troublesome Irishmen ; abso- 
lutely nothing for prosecuting them. Not one in a million 
could have told who poor Killeen was yesterday. To-day 
the jail officials are more afraid of him than he is of bolts 
and bars. 

Nov. 22?td. An historic day at Balla, where the first 

1 A species of powder squib, then popular with small boys. 

231 



232 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

of the evictions was to have come off. As I stood 
shivering on the platform at Castlerea, met Parnell, who, 
with a falcon's eye for his chance, had come down by 
special train during the night. Robinson, of Daily 
Telegraph, and a troop of minor English specials, have 
swarmed over as to a revolution. An eviction that might 
have come off before a few dozen villagers, had all 
England and Ireland watching — and did not come off at 
all. And it was the tocsin rung from the Castle did it 
all. At a preliminary council of war at M'Ellin's Hotel 

^ objected to the resolutions as illegal and said they 

would all be prosecuted. " Don't you think, Mr. ," said 

P., " our Law Adviser had better have remained at home 
to-day ? " But it was a narrow shave. It was the first 
time I saw P. in a fury. A vast column of young men, 
four deep, marched up the hill at top of which the police 
were mustered around the tenant's house. All of a 
sudden the column divided into a huge crescent formation, 
Zulu fashion, spreading out at a rush to right and left, 
threatening to envelop the handful of police. Police 
rushed to their rifles and stood to arms in a perfect panic. 
P. ran to one of the horns of the crescent and charged 
them furiously to fall back, striking at their heads with 
his umbrella and tumbling over one big countryman who 
had a stick and looked nasty. It was a dangerous 
moment. But Parnell and Brennan carried their point 
and beat back the column. " Only for you, Mr. Parnell," 
the frightened police officer afterwards said, " there would 
have been murder." " Yes," said P., with his peculiar 
smile, " and suicide." The eviction was abandoned, and 
the victors left in possession of the battlefield. Great joy 
and four hours of wild speechmaking in Balla. 

Parnell followed up his advantage. At the jail- 
gate he scoffed at the arrests, held a meeting to 

^ A lawyer whose care for his personal safety soon withdrew him 
from the movement. 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 233 

denounce jury-packing outside the Assize Court, 
where Messrs. Davitt and Daly were tried, and 
caused the prosecution to evaporate in contempt and 
ridicule. By a system of resistance carried to the 
extreme verge of peril, but not an inch beyond, he 
paralysed the agrarian law in Ireland as successfully 
as he had driven a coach-and-four through the rules 
of the House of Commons by obstruction. He had 
the supreme gift, so rarely to be found in Ireland, 
of knowing when it was wisdom to be moderate and 
when it was wisdom to be extreme. Having laid 
his lines in the House of Commons and in Ireland, 
he now proceeded to annex the almost unexplored 
and illirriitable field of Irish-American sympathy. 

Dec. \6th. A long chat with P. He induced the 
Central Tenants' Association to snuff themselves out 
to-day in favour of the more radical Land League. He 
leaves for U.S. Sunday, with Dillon. Told me he had 
asked E. D. G. to send me with him, but fears E. D. G. 
still champs the bit. Several ugly attempts in Frtcman 
to set the new League and the fixity-of-tenure people by 
the ears. Always an unsure friend. ... In any case, 
mother's illness would make it impossible. A Sceur de 
bon secoiirs with her night and day. Bronchitis turning to 
pneumonia ; Dr. O'L.^ tells me the shadow of an 
incurable disease behind. I groan at the contrast between 
my uselessness and the Sceur's angelic ways. Still, she 
loves to see me in the room ; it is her only worldly 
comfort, short of death. . . . Told me his accounts from 
the country bore out the worst anticipations of my letters. 
" They have found it out at the Castle at last," he said. 

1 The late eminent surgeon, Dr. O'Leary, M.P. for Drogheda. 



234 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

" They are going to fight the Famine — or is it the League ? 
— from behind the Duchess' ^ petticoats." " Worse might 
happen," I ventured to remark, " than if Jemmy himself 
would start out on a rival begging-tour to spite you." 
" Yes," said P., " it would be the best of his Irish jokes. 
We shall want a million of money." 

As the winter advanced, the distress deepened 
steadily, from privation to actual starvation. When 
I visited the wild islands of Inishbofin and Inishark 
in December, I found men and women in the latter 
island lying on the floor of their cabins, too weak 
from hunger to rise, or even to frighten the rats 
which, it was remarked, were beginning to attack 
them in their beds, through some instinct of vultures 
scenting a prey. There was nothing to eat except 
slocaun cooked with Indian meal, and not much of 
that. A relief schooner, laden with meal, was 
lying in Westport, waiting for an abatement of the 
tempest that howls along this formidable coast for 
weeks together in the winter. When the schooner 
ventured forth, and won the race for life for the 
islanders, it was deemed a heroic feat. A row- 
boat, even the frail canvas-backed curragh, is a 
safer storm-bird in these seas ; but no amount of 
money I (in my ignorance of the danger) could offer 
would induce the Boffin men to trust their cockle- 

1 Chief Secretary Lowther, having all the autumn scoffed at the 
fear of famine with stable-yard merriment, the Duchess of Marl- 
borough, on December i8th, issued an urgent appeal to the world 
for charitable funds, and thenceforward devoted herself with a gracious 
assiduity to the alleviation of the calamity the permanent officials 
would have fain ignored. Her relief fund realised ^135,000. 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 235 

shell curragh over the foaming stretch of water to 
Inishark, until the priest volunteered to take his 
seat first in the curragh. 

My first visit to Clare Island was made in a row- 
boat, manned by four stalwart Achill men — between 
whose hungry eyes and grand natural strength of 
bone and sinew there was a ghastly contrast. A 
crowd, and apparently not a friendly one, awaited 
us on the shore after our stormy passage. We 
afterwards learned that the Clare Islanders were at 
the moment "expecting the Sheriff." In other 
words, a police expedition on board a gunboat was 
awaiting a lull in the storm to make a descent for 
rent upon the unhappy island, and it took some time 
to convince the people that our boat did not carry a 
scouting-party for the Sheriff.^ The island, which 
was thus to be raided for rent by a gunboat, was so 
destitute of food that the best the good priest of the 
island had to offer me was a cup of tea and a home- 
made cake of Indian meal. For want of more 
substantial fare, it was unfortunately deemed best to 
give my boatmen a glass of whiskey apiece to 
fortify them for the return journey. The result was 

1 Life has given me few happier reflections than that Clare Island, 
which I thus saw for the first time under all the terrors of hunger 
and squalid landlord oppression, is now, owing to a train of circum- 
stances of peculiar satisfaction to the writer, a happy community of 
peasant proprietors, free for ever from the shadow of famine, land- 
lordism, gunboat, or sheriff. I had the happiness of seeing the 
steamer, in which the agent and sheriff used to invade the island 
for rent, rotting to pieces on the beach near Mallow Cottage, its 
occupation and that of the sheriff-agent being gone. 



236 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

to afford me an interesting proof both of the weak- 
ness to which want of proper food had reduced the 
people and of the staying-power of tea as compared 
with whiskey. When we set off, the poor fellows, 
under the influence of the stimulant, lay to their 
oars with a gallant cheer, and for the first hour or 
two sent their boat quivering up and down the 
precipitous sides of the waves, which ran mountains 
high, with the most extraordinary swiftness and 
sureness. Their energies then fell away. They 
bore up manfully as long as the current in the North 
Channel had to be fought, but once in the smoother 
waters, within shelter of the shore, they collapsed 
with a suddenness that made me alarmed for their 
lives. Several of them drew in their oars and lay 
literally motionless in the bottom of the boat. I had 
to struggle into the place of one of them, with infinite 
danger of a capsize, and it was the clumsy oar of the 
tea-drinker (for three of whose physique any one of 
the Achill men, if commonly well fed, would have 
been more than a match) that principally helped to 
drag the boat up Achill Sound long after midnight. 
A local land-agent coolly told me the next day 
there was nothing wrong with the men except 
whiskey. For the credit of human nature, it was 
a joy to meet the rector of the Protestant Achill 
Mission, the Rev. Mr. Greer, who all but shed 
tears over the poor people's sufferings and was 
closeted daily with the parish priest devising 
measures to soften the iron hearts of official and 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 237 

landlord. The most serious proposal up to that 
time made in the neighbourhood to deal with 
thousands of starving people was that of an ex- 
cellent but visionary English colonel, who dis- 
tributed fowling-pieces among the coastguards to 
shoot cormorants for the people's use. 

There were soon four separate, if not rival, organ- 
isations afoot to cope with the distress so long 
stoutly denied. The Castle made a determined 
attempt to capture the incoming Lord Mayor (Mr. 
Gray) and make the Mansion House ancillary to 
its own appeal. Gray was not, however, to be 
seduced by a title. He saw all the disadvantages 
of entrusting the charity of the world to a group 
of irresponsible officials, who had already cruelly 
neglected their duty, and, if uncontrolled, would 
rest unavoidably under the suspicion of dispensing 
their bounty with a view to the exigencies of 
governmental policy. He started a Mansion 
House Fund of his own on a wide National basis, 
which eventually outstripped the Castle Fund, as 
well as stimulated the energies of its promoters, 
and subjected the allocation of its grants to a 
wholesome control. The Lord-Lieutenant foolishly 
took offence at the independent action of the 
Mansion House, and by declining to attend the 
traditional Lord Mayor's banquet, began that 
divorce between the Castle and the Mansion House 
which marked an epoch in the de-anglicisation of Ire- 
land. Gray quietly proceeded to build up his Relief 



238 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Fund to ^181,000, and left the Lord- Lieutenant 
alone with his dignity. With the gracious aid of his 
wife, he turned the Mansion House into a Court, in 
whose bewitching air and splendid hospitalities the 
dingy glories of Dublin Castle were soon forgotten. 
A third rival confronted Parnell on his American 
tour. The Nezu York Herald had been poisoned 
against the Irish Cause by the reports of a "dis- 
gruntled" special correspondent, who, owing to 
some obscure spretae injuria forjiiae of the kind that 
often colours a stranger's whole view of a country, 
was pouring forth a daily bombardment of red-hot 
shot against Parnell, through the columns of his 
powerful journal, and who, later on, became one of 
the London Times principal stipendiaries in the 
work of defaming the Irish leaders. The New 
York Herald threw all its weight into the assault 
upon Parnell, with the avowed object of driving 
him out of the country as a fraudulent agitator, re- 
pudiated by the great majority of the Irish Members 
of Parliament, bishops, and priests. Parnell with- 
stood the attack with characteristic calmness ; he 
bore the outcries of the hectoring New York journal 
with the same provoking equanimity with which he 
allowed the howls and cat-calls of the House of 
Commons to exhaust themselves, carried his appeal 
unperturbed from one great city to another, and so 
completely succeeded in arousing American atten- 
tion to the dimensions of the Irish crisis, that the 
formidable newspaper, which began by undertaking 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 239 

to hoot him out of America, was forced to conclude 
by working with all its might to raise an Irish 
Famine Fund of its own.^ The New York Herald 

1 It was at one of his Boston meetings on this trying tour that the 
famous orator, Wendell Phillips, began his speech with the exordium : 
" I have come here to see the man who made John Bull listen." 
Parnell's business capacity was never better displayed than by the 
arrangements by which he managed to extract the last cent from his 
audiences for the object of his visit. " There was always," he used 
to tell, "a Judge or a General in the chair to give the people a fine 
speech. Then, when Dillon and I had sufficiently depressed the 
public with our speeches, we would go through the hall with our hats 
in our hands, and men would tumble over one another to throw in a 
100 dollar bill." He related one amusing experience of one of those 
great gatherings in the West. The Governor of the State, who pre- 
sided, and who probably knew little more of the Irish question than 
the size of the Irish vote in his section, was discussing the evening's 
proceedings after the meeting in the hotel. " Somehow," he said, 
" Parnell did not impress me a bit. When I saw this sleek young 
dude, as well fed as you or I and a darned sight better groomed, I 
said to myself, ' The Herald knows what it's about. The idea of 
sending out a man like that to tell us they are all starving ! ' But 
when the other man, poor Dillon, came along with hunger written 
on every line of his face, I said, ' Ah ! that's a different thing. 
There's the Irish famine right enough!' and I guess my 500 
dollar bill would not wait in my pocket any longer." A procession 
of State troops and Hibernian military companies, with flags and 
bands of music, would generally await the Irish envoy at the railway 
depot to escort him through the city. It was soon noticed that on 
these occasions Parnell had a way of disappearing at the back of 
the train, and not discovering himself until the business meeting in 
the evening. His explanation in a confidential moment was 
characteristic. " All that half the people in an American town 
want to see in these shows is the man. If they can see him for 
nothing, you won't find them turning up for the collection." Many 
mistook proceedings like this for the tricks of a mystery man. 
Many more will doubtless find the hard materialism of his little joke 
somewhat trying. Nevertheless, there could be no grosser mis- 
reading of his character than to attribute such traits to cynicism, or 
to anything except an honest simplicity and directness of purpose, 
which was not a selfish purpose. His business was to collect money 
for starving people, and he took the shrewdest means of achieving 
his object in the largest measure, in place of basking in the idle 
popularity of street parades. 



240 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

little knew its man when it hit upon the device of 
spiting Parnell by raising an additional ;^50,ooo for 
his starving countrymen. There was a million of 
money wanting. Parnell had no small jealousies as 
to where it was to come from — whether through the 
agency of the New York Herald or of Dublin 
Castle — since all the world knew it was his agitation 
which was putting these agencies in motion for 
purposes of their own. Accordingly, he no sooner 
found that the New York Herald Fund and the 
Duchess of Marlborough Fund and the Dublin 
Mansion House Fund were progressing at a rate 
which relieved him of anxiety as to the pressure of 
mere famine, than he turned his own energies to 
the graver object of excising the causes of famine 
by an appeal to Irish- America to afford him the 
means of effecting a permanent agrarian revolution. 
The pawky American journal which undertook to 
drive the Irish leader out of the States by booming 
its own Famine Fund, found it had simply succeeded 
in setting him free to direct his appeals henceforth 
in a great measure to the collection of a Fighting 
Fund, which was the nucleus of all the subsequent 
achievements of the Land League. 

While the American tour was in full swing, he 
was all of a sudden called back to Ireland. Early 
in March 1880, Disraeli, staggering under the 
effects of the Midlothian campaign and of the bye- 
elections that followed, unexpectedly dissolved Par- 
liament on a still more unexpected issue. By one 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 241 

of those brilliant Asian transformation-scenes with 
which his life glittered, he published a manifesto to 
the astonished country, hinting that his adversaries 
were contemplating the dismemberment of the 
Empire by some tremendous concession to an 
Ireland in a state of veiled rebellion. Gladstone, 
who, far from contemplating at this moment any 
scheme of Home Rule, or even of further Irish 
Land Reform — who had scarcely heard of the ex- 
istence of the Land League, and was absorbed 
wholly in the exciting controversies of the Balkans 
and of South Africa — was unable to see anything 
more serious in his rival's prognostications as to 
the cominof Irish crisis than the device of an Asiatic 
juggler to humbug the country, by turning away its 
thoughts from the iniquities of Sir Henry Layard at 
Constantinople and of Sir Bartle Frere in the 
Transvaal. Gladstone's great majority of 1880 
was, as a matter of fact, returned with no more 
reference to, or even consciousness of, what was 
going on in Ireland than if this island lay amidst 
the icebergs of the Polar Circle. 

Parnell's task of reforming the Irish representa- 
tion seemed an almost hopeless one. Not many 
people remember that even then his Parliamentary 
following only consisted of 7 men out of 103 
Irish members. The great majority of the men 
who more or less casually followed Butt, distrusted 
him, held aloof from him, and, whenever the 
opportunity safely offered, attacked him. No Irish 



242 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

daily newspaper gave him more than a quahfied 
allegiance. When he landed in Cork to find the 
writs for the General Election already sped, all 
seemed to be confusion. For lack of candidates he 
had to be nominated himself for three different con- 
stituencies — Cork City, Meath, and Mayo — and he 
had to fly from one coast to the other by special 
train night after night to make any head against 
innumerable foes or shifty friends. Only for the 
fortunate turn the New York Herald had unwit- 
tingly given to his American tour, even funds 
enough to pay for the special trains would scarcely 
have been forthcoming. The Election Fund of the 
Carlton Club had actually to be resorted to for 
payment of his own election expenses in Cork City. 
His candidate for the borough of Mallow was 
ignominiously defeated by a Castle lawyer, who 
was thus enabled to climb into an Attorney-General- 
ship and a Judgeship. Of more than a hundred 
priests in the constituency of Cork City, only two 
young curates ventured to take sides with him, and 
these were promptly dealt with by the Bishop for 
their offence. The Bishop himself made a public 
speech repudiating the new Dictator. Electoral 
spirit was even still at so low an ebb, that it was 
with a thrill of relief the country learned that 
Parnell had come even second on the poll in the 
most National city of Ireland, the first being a local 
Whig mediocrity who had been a consistent supporter 
of Coercion Acts. Four bishops published a joint 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 243 

manifesto agairivSt his candidate for the great county 
of Cork,^ who was hopelessly distanced at the polls 
by Colonel Colthurst, an amiable Catholic gentleman 
of an all but invisible Home Rule tinge. 

Through good fortune or ill, Parnell fought on 
to the last polling-booth, and carried the war into 
the most seemingly inveterate partes infidelium. 
The result was an amazing one. In mere numbers 
his followers were still only thirty-five all told, but 
they included a band of young men who would 
have made the fortune of any party — men of high 
Nationalist traditions and varied intellectual endow- 
ments — " landless resolutes," unmarried, unfettered 
— ready for any danger — free from the slightest 
craving for ministerial preferment — holding the most 
venerated English Parliamentary conventions in 
inexpressible contempt — content to battle their way 
through the House of Commons as a foreign body, 
neither giving nor expecting quarter, with eyes for 
nothing but the interests and the public opinion of 
their own country, misruled, wasted, and despised by 
this ignorant and stolid, and apparently irresistible, 
alien assembly — and never more joyously satisfied 
that they were doing their duty with effect than 
when they had an infuriated House of Commons 
shouting at them, and the Press of England baying 
in chorus at their heels, since they knew Parlia- 

1 Mr. A. J. Kettle, whom Parnell, in a moment of perfectly 
solemn, and perhaps unconscious, pleasantry, described in one of his 
speeches as " a man whose name is a household word in every cabin 
in this land." 



244 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

mentary insurrection to be the indispensable pre- 
liminary to Parliamentary redress. Since Pym and 
Selden first began to startle the Stuarts, the House 
of Commons had beheld no minority so daring, so 
single-minded, or destined to accomplish so wide a 
change in Parliamentary institutions. Nor was the 
intestine discord which had so often delivered Eng- 
land from her fear of Irish combinations to show 
itself for many years to come. The new Party were 
bound together with triple hoops of steel by their 
necessities, as not only a minority of the House, but 
a minority of the Irish minority. They were inspired 
by the blithe comradeship of generous youth, con- 
scious of the power of striking brilliant intellectual 
blows in a historic conflict, and, above all, by the 
influence of a great leader, which was as lightly felt 
as the pressure of the atmosphere, but was no less 
steady and vitalising. 

Parnell had less to do than is generally supposed 
with the choice of his lieutenants. Take the case 
of Mr. T. P. O'Connor as an example. If he had 
gone to Galway as an extreme Nationalist, it is 
doubtful whether, under the corrupt conditions of 
borough representation at the time, he could have 
won the seat at all. He was elected as an old and 
brilliant student of the local Queen's College. I am 
not sure that he had even met the Irish leader. 
All that was known (or indeed asked) about his 
politics was that he had lived long amidst English 
Radical associations and was supposed to be one of 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 245 

the rising hopes of that Party. Had he used his 
election to serve a selfish ambition, his way to- 
wards a seat in the first Liberal Cabinet, if not 
eventually to the highest seat, was assured. No- 
body since Mr. Chamberlain's " Radical days " has 
arisen to give the Radicals the predominance 
which his masterful powers of debate and sunny 
personality might have won for them. If " T. P." 
without a qualm sacrificed his English interests to 
become one of the most dashing outlaws of the 
Irish Party, and one of the most precious elements 
of its cohesiveness as well as brilliancy, Parnell's 
genius is no doubt to be thanked for deciding his 
choice, but was wholly without influence over the 
choice of Galway. 

No less accidental, so far as Parnell's prevision 
went, was the accession of Mr. James J. O'Kelly, 
who became one of the most potent influences in 
the secret councils of the Party, and enjoyed the 
confidence of his chief in intimate and momentous 
affairs to a greater degree than any of his colleagues, 
with, perhaps, an exception that Mr. O'Kelly would 
be the first to acknowledge. This fine soldier, who 
had passed through the most dangerous episodes 
of the Fenian struggle unscathed, who had ruffled 
through the Algerian campaigns among the dare- 
devils of the Foreign Legion, who had exhausted 
all the romances of Mexican adventure in the army 
of Bazaine, and who, when the General Election 
came, had only just been set free from the Spanish 



246 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

prison, where he lay under sentence of being shot 
for his exploits as special correspondent of the 
New York Herald during the Cuban Insurrection, 
might possibly never have been a member of the 
Irish Party, if he had allowed himself to be swayed 
by Parnell's advice. He thought it madness for an 
unknown Irish- American, without money or even 
any known gift of speech, to go down to the vast 
county of Roscommon at a few days' notice, to 
challenge the ascendency of the O'Conor Don, 
surrounded with all the prestige of his royal pedi- 
gree and of a quarter of a century's possession, and 
supported by the unbroken strength of the Bishop 
and priests and of the landlords. He tried hard to 
dissuade Mr. O' Kelly from the raid on Roscommon. 
Human foresight, indeed, might well have refused 
to contemplate the possibility of the astonishing 
victory, which burst through these ancient ramparts 
as through matchwood, and, as with a rush of 
revolutionary pikes, carried into the new Party a 
colleague whose daring turned out to be so happily 
combined with wisdom that he came to be known 
among his brother-members as " the Fenian Whig," 
and whose style of speaking, brief and abrupt as the 
reports of a man emptying the chambers of a 
revolver, was chastened by a pretty and even 
romantic courtesy, worthy of French soldiership at 
its best.^ 

1 One of the most foolish episodes of my Hfe was a challenge to 
a duel I was induced to bring on Mr. O' Kelly's behalf to a Mr. 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 247 

The original Party of Obstruction of the days 
when "We were Seven" contained two men of 
striking gifts, who were already beginning to fall 
away from the flag — Mr. O'Connor Power, who, 
perhaps under personal circumstances of which to 
know all would be to pardon a great deal, allowed 
himself gradually to be seduced into attacks on his 
old comrades, amidst the heady cheers of the Govern- 
ment benches ; and Mr, Frank Hugh O'Donnell, 
whose idiosyncrasy, best described by the German 
term Partictilai'isnius, grown to a disease, spoiled 
his rich store of abilities, and soon made him a 
hopelessly unclubbable colleague.^ But their place 

M'Coan, member for Wicklow, who had Hved much abroad. Mr. 
M'Coan made himself still more ridiculous by invoking the protec- 
tion of the House of Commons. The affair would have ended 
amidst general laughter, only for Mr. O' Kelly's grave and soldierly 
speech of one sentence in reply to an appeal from Gladstone. 
"The hon. member and I," he said, "have lived in lands where 
a certain code is the recognised rule of life among men of honour, 
and now that the member for Wicklow shrinks from complying 
with the requirements of that code, he sinks out of the category 
of honourable men, and I have no difficulty in saying I shall carry 
the matter no further." For probably the only time in this genera- 
tion, the House of Commons found itself bowing in mute respect 
before a duellist. Mr. O' Kelly had levelled his pistol and brought 
down his man before the House could recover from its surprise. 

1 Mr. Healy hit upon his weak spot, and at the same time sealed 
his political fate, by the change of a letter in his name ; he dubbed 
him " Mr. Crank Hugh O'Donnell." Mr. O'Donnell's grand passion 
in politics was a confederation of all the discontented races of the 
Empire under the lead of the Irish Party. He once brought down 
some scores of dusky students of all the races and creeds of Hindustan 
to the House of Commons, to tender their solemn allegiance to Mr. 
Pamell — to the wonder of the policemen and the quidnuncs of the 
Lobby. The moment, however, the Party appointed a committee to 
see what could be made of his foreign policy, we found the project 
had lost all its charm for him. Perhaps the most savage thing ever 



248 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

was taken by three men of Parliamentary abilities 
such as few empires, with all the splendid prizes 
of office in their gift, can command in their public 
servants. The most conspicuous figure of the 
three in character, if not in intellect, was Mr. John 
Dillon, who came in for the county of Tipperary. 
He thus inherited the seat held by his father, who 
had come out of the ordeal of the Young Ireland 
Insurrection with the unspotted reputation of one 
who had been the last to consent to the call to arms, 
but the first to affront its perils and to endure with 
a quiet fortitude the sufferings and ruin which fol- 
lowed. The languorous and halting monotony of 
his own speeches during the Mitchel election had 
already given way to the mysterious ardour by which 
even plain words, straight from the heart, can send 
an electric current through a crowd, and the trans- 
parent sincerity that shone from his worn face 
conquered the respect of men in the House of 
Commons who listened to his language with horror. 
" I should hang you, Mr. Dillon, if I got the chance, 
but I should be infinitely sorry," remarked a fine old 
Tory Admiral, Sir John Hay, who used to sit near 
us during the Gladstone administration. 

said by Mr. W. E. Forster, in the hour of his own great failure, was 
said at the expense of Mr. O'Donnell. Forster was repeating 
one of his half- crazy charges against Parnell and his colleagues 
of connivance at crime. " Oh ! Oh ! Shame ! Shame ! " cried Mr. 
O'Donnell from the opposite side of the House. " I was not referring 
to the hon. member for Dungarvan," was Forster's pitiless retort ; 
" I cannot imagine any sane body of men for any good or evil 
purpose taking the hon. member into their confidence." 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 249 

Everybody in the House, outside the Irish group, 
would have, on the contrary, joined in hanging Mr, 
T. M. Healy with a whoop, prime favourite as he 
has become amongst them in later times ; and the 
Tim of the days of his "early manner " would have 
chuckled over the whoop as the highest compliment 
they could pay him. His theory of the uses to 
which the House of Commons should be consigned 
by Irishmen was one compared to which Mr. Willie 
Redmond's precognisation of it, as a place where 
Cossacks would yet stable their horses, was delicacy 
and moderation. A quarter of an hour after he 
took his seat as member for Wexford he started up 
to make his maiden speech — tiny of frame, sardonic 
of visage, his hands in his breeches pockets, as 
coolly insolent as a Parisian gamin roaming through 
the Tuileries Palace at the heels of Louis- Philippe, 
making havoc of the pictures and mirrors, as entirely 
detestable as a small Diogenes peering out over the 
rims of his pince-nez, as from his tub, through bilious 
eyes, over his contemptible audience — and horrified 
the House of Commons with the following exordium : 
"Mr. Speaker, if the noble Marquis" (Hartington) 
" thinks he is going to bully us with his high and 
mighty Cavendish ways, all I can tell him is he will 
find himself knocked into a cocked hat in a jiffey, 
and we will have to put him to the necessity of 
wiping the blood of all the Cavendishes from his 
noble nose a good many times before he disposes 
of us." Outside the exceedingly small circle of 



250 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

friends who really knew him, his disagreeableness 
was displayed to those of his own way of thinking 
all but as offensively as to foes. He had as great 
a physical horror of shaking hands, even with his 
closest friends, as a miser would have of pulling out 
his purse. His theory of life was to regard every- 
body as an enemy until the contrary was proved. 
He affected a brutality of speech at which Rabelais 
or Swift in his least dainty moment might have 
hesitated. I once heard him conclude a harangue 
with this unique peroration : " I have nothing more 
to say to you : I have discharged my stomach." 
His more serious faults of temperament and his 
superb powers as a Parliamentary swordsman were 
still undeveloped and unsuspected. The House of 
Commons for a long time regarded Tim as a mere 
larrikin, though a diabolically clever one. The 
crowd, whom his irony and wild paradoxes only 
puzzled, took very much the same view, except that 
they delighted to see his impish tricks practised 
against their local tyrants and their wincing Saxon 
rulers. To the House of Commons he was simply 
hateful and hurtful, and as Ireland's business for the 
hour was just to make her power hateful and hurtful, 
both he and the Irish people were completely 
content with his role. It was only the half-dozen 
or dozen men who knew his amazing fertility of 
intellectual resource, his devouring industry, his 
resolute ambition, his eloquence of tongue and pen, 
rich with plentiful and sometimes not too reverent 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 251 

borrowings from the Old Testament, who knew 
how very much greater things were before him. 
Few even of those who saw clearly enough the 
uncertainty of temper, the bursts of fierce clansman's 
passion, the lack of rigid governing principle, the 
love of eccentric and risky paradoxes, which always 
led us to take his view of any particular question as 
prima facie evidence that the opposite view was the 
wise one ; in a word, that absence of a well-balanced 
judgment which alone disqualified him for unmistak- 
able and incontestable greatness — few even of these, 
except perhaps Parnell, whose reserves as to Mr. 
Healy began at an astonishingly early period of the 
movement, could see any reason to anticipate that 
these weaknesses were destined to turn his best 
qualities awry, and to exact so heavy a price for his 
unquestionably splendid services to his country. 

The habit our people have borrowed from 
Plutarch of always contrasting a Numa and a 
Lycurgus, or an Aristides and a Cato the Censor, 
caused the names of Mr. Healy and Mr. Thomas 
Sexton to be linked together from the outset in a 
comparison which ended in a lifelong rivalry of 
some bitterness. Nevertheless, except that both 
were young men of superb intellectual capacity, and 
had no other early educational advantages than those 
they owed to the noble order of Christian Brothers, 
and that both had come to light unexpectedly and, 
as it seemed, by mere chance, from the diamond- 
quarries of native genius, their powers were the 



252 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

complement the one of the other, rather than a 
cause of mutual depreciation. Mr. Sexton's breadth 
of view, his dighity of language and grasp of great 
principles and, in a special manner, of financial 
intricacies, completed in a debate the effect of 
his nimble colleague's airier and more pungent 
sallies. His power of producing an endless pro- 
fusion of long-drawn and smooth-flowing sentences, 
in language of extraordinary opulence and in a 
spontaneous form as faultless as if every word had 
been carefully premeditated, was only exceeded, 
and not greatly exceeded, by Gladstone among 
his Parliamentary contemporaries. He had another 
of the great qualifications of Parliarnentary success — 
an interest in the fortunes of debate which seemed 
almost to exclude all other interests. He would 
sit alone by the hour, or the half-dozen hours, 
watching the sword-play even of some dull debate, 
with the passion which chains a Spaniard to his 
seat at a bull-feast. He was able to repeat, from a 
marvellous memory, every retort and rejoinder from 
side to side, as faithfully as if his brain were a 
sheet of shorthand-notes ; and he was ready at a 
moment's notice to step down himself into the 
arena and wave his scarf and plant his spear with 
a master hand. When the darts of that still more 
provoking Toreador, Mr. Healy, eventually made 
the arena distasteful to him and caused his with- 
drawal from Parliamentary life, his old colleagues 
were lost in wonder and incredulity at the decision 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 253 

that reduced those magnificent oratorical gifts to 
silence, and exchanged the theatre of his glory and, 
as it seemed, of his fondest interest for the obscure 
successes of a commercial career. If he has not 
left a deeper impression on the history of his 
generation, the fact can only be attributed to the 
nervous sensibilities which are so often the penalty 
of fine talents, to the superabundance of words 
which sometimes watered off his best arguments 
into diffuseness, and perhaps to an excess of that 
logical rigidity which sometimes made him over- 
look the practical effect of principles and figures in 
real life, through an almost morbidly clear view of 
the abstract demands of right reasoning and stern 
finance. 

Another of the young paladins of the new group 
had come in already for New Ross, in the person 
of Mr. John Redmond. His frank and handsome 
presence, his self-restraint of manner, and remarkable 
faculty of lucid and captivating oratory, gave early 
promise, which he has not disappointed, of success 
in a House which has by no means lost the gusto 
for grace and ornament of speech. Still another of 
the unexpected nuggets which the General Election 
dug out of the Irish diamond-field was a young 
Waterford solicitor named Edmund Leamy, who 
typified, perhaps better than any of the rest, the 
charms and foibles of the Keltic genius. An 
eloquence of the rarest stamp, flashing at unlooked- 
for moments like live lightning out of the darkness, 



254 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

all fire and poetry and wayward force, but then, 
again, lost in the night of Keltic uncertainty, 
shyness, depression, or mere indolence — lovable 
even for his faults, and irritating for his obstinate 
failure to give his capacities fair play — Edmund 
Leamy was one of the best types I ever met 
both of the half- resigned ineffectiveness which 
sometimes tempts one to despair of our race, and 
of the glowing depths of divine passion which 
inspire us with an undying belief in and love for 
the unhappy land apostrophised in Mr. T. D. 
Sullivan's illogical but — to an Irishman — wholly 
comprehensible lines : 

We've heard her faults a hundred times — the new ones and 
the old — 

In songs and sermons, rants and rhymes, enlarged a hundred- 
fold ; 

But take them all, the great and small, and this we've got to 
say — 

Here's dear old Ireland, brave old Ireland, Ireland, boys, 
hurrah ! 

From an older school — that of the young men 
who had kindled at reading Thomas Davis's verses 
in the Nation, and seen William Smith O'Brien 
in the dock at Clonmel receiving his sentence of 
death with the proud courtesy of a simple-hearted 
gentleman — there came an accession more valuable 
still. Those who only knew Justin M'Carthy from 
his books, or in his own sunny social atmosphere, 
puzzled their wits in vain to guess what could be 
the attraction for this successful and happy-hearted 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 255 

literary man of middle age of a seat amongst a 
set of rough-tongued, lawless Ishmaelites, who were 
the objects of all but unanimous detestation in the 
House of Commons, and whose methods better 
befitted the backwoods camp than the cloisters of 
Academe. An enormous Nonconformist reading 
public had come to read the tranquil pages of The 
Water dale Neighbours and Dear Lady Disdain 
with the same gentle confidence of finding there 
charming philosophy and sweet reasonableness as 
if Mr. M'Carthy's novels were newly -discovered 
Apocryphal Gospels. They were almost as much 
shocked to hear of their favourite novelist taking 
his place among the Irish outlaws as if they 
had found infernal machines planted under their 
suburban fiower-beds. It is, I think, certain that, 
in joining the Irish Party, Mr. McCarthy parted at 
least for a time with most of his readers, as well as 
with all his pleasant leisure. He had henceforth 
to write his daily non-political article for the Daily 
News at a table upstairs in the inner Lobby, from 
which he could hear the war raging inside between 
his colleagues and the Government, of which the 
Daily News was the chief organ ; and having finished 
his allotted span of "copy," he would be himself, 
ten minutes afterwards, in the thick of the battle. 

No Irishman of our time made heavier sacrifices. 
That he would not have stopped short of still 
heavier ones, none who knew the inmost man could 
doubt. Mr. T. P. O'Connor's mot : " One could 



256 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

almost wish Justin McCarthy had been hanged, if 
it were only to show how a quiet man could die 
for Ireland," only expressed the feeling of all who 
have seen him in hours of crisis. Having a keen 
sense of humour, he would be the last to repeat for 
himself the somewhat transpontine boast : Si fractus 
illabatur orbis, Impavidum me ferient ruinae ; but 
of no man could it be with more certainty said that, 
if the ruins of a falling world were tumbling around 
him, they would find him not merely unafraid, but 
cheerful. His sweetness of nature did not in the 
least lessen his firmness upon the proper occasion. 
When our intestine conflicts in the non-Parnellite 
Party were at their worst, in 1893, M''- Healy and 
one of the most formidable-looking bruisers of his 
section waited on Mr, M'Carthy to warn him that 
if he, as Chairman of the Party, took sides against 
him at a Party meeting to be held in the afternoon, 
Mr, Healy and nineteen of his colleagues would 
secede. "That," remarked the Chairman, gently 
stroking his beard, "would be very unfortunate — 
for the nineteen. Time is up for our meeting. 
Tim, let us have a glass of grog," 

On another of those horrid occasions, when a 
passage of arms took place between Mr, Healy, 
whom his friends styled " The man in the gap," 
and myself, whose forehead had been split open in a 
recent election riot in Cork, the Chairman threw oil 
upon the rising waters of Party strife with the quaint 
remark : " For goodness' sake, don't let us fall out 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 257 

about this slight difference. There is a good deal 
to be said for the Man in the Gap, and perhaps there 
is a good deal to be said too for the Gap in the Man." 
Smarting under the sting of the Kilkenny election, 
Parnell, during one of our conversations at Boulogne, 
expressed in his own way his sense of how awkward 
an antagonist Mr. M'Carthy could be upon occasion. 
I was urging upon him that, if men like M'Carthy 
had been forced to declare against him, he might be 
sure it was not through any desire to wound him. 
"My dear O'Brien," was the reply, "you don't 
know that old gentleman when he wields his 
umbrella." 

The personal relations between the two rival 
chiefs were among the few gleams of light through 
the foul darkness of the split of 1890, and were 
thoroughly characteristic of the two men. Upon 
the night when Parnell was composing his famous 
Manifesto, Mr. M'Carthy, who was the leader of the 
opposition in Committee Room 15, was his brother- 
guest at the house of Dr. Fitzgerald, M.P. They 
sat smoking and sipping their grog after dinner, 
while Parnell sat at a side-table stringing together 
"the historic document which was to proclaim 
the irreconcilable rupture of the alliance with 
Gladstone, and to make the never-to-be-forgotten 
appeal to the Irish race "not to throw him to the 
English wolves." At last he started up with relief 
from the agonies composition always cost him, and, 
lighting his cigar, cried : " Now, Justin, it's all over 



258 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

except the peroration. What shall it be?" " I'm 
afraid, Parnell," was the prompt response, " it ought 
to be a quotation from Grattan : ' I watched over 
the cradle of Irish Liberty, and now I am following it 
to its tomb.' " But to the last the relations between 
the two men continued to be such as to redeem the 
horrors of that time of mad and savage misunder- 
standing. I have related elsewhere that the last 
time I ever saw Parnell, after all the ferocious 
strife of the Kilkenny contest, he came up to me 
in company with Mr. M'Carthy in the Lobby of 
the House of Commons. "Why," said I, "who 
should ever have expected to see this trio met 
together ? " " Yes," said Parnell, with one of his 
softest smiles, " Justin and I have been over to 
the City together about the Paris Funds, to the 
admiration of all beholders." But we were still 
many a year of glorious comradeship before those 
days of earthquake chasms. The Justin M'Carthy 
who took service under Parnell's perilous flag in 
1880 brouQ^ht to his cause some faint and tender 
perfume of the Young Ireland days to soften the 
harsher necessities of later and more grimly practical 
methods. He brought also the unchanging cheer- 
fulness that, at private junketing or public banquet, 
caused his colleaqfues to warm themselves in his 
presence as before a merry Christmas fire, and the 
unblemished reputation which silenced even the 
most stolid English prejudice, and must have made 
the augurs of the Times newspaper smile in one 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 259 

another's faces when they made of Justin M'Carthy 
one of the darkest of the cloaked and Guy-Fawkes- 
hatted conspirators who plotted the Phoenix Park 
murders in a railway carriage at Willesden Junction. 
A queerly different, though still more potent 
figure, was that of Mr. Joseph Gillis Biggar, who had 
as little in common with Justin M'Carthy as a com- 
mercial ledger has with a book of sonnets, save that 
they had both reached a later middle age and were 
both devotedly attached to Ireland and to their 
leader. There is some doubt whether Biggar was 
not the actual inventor of Parliamentary obstruction, 
and consequently the author of an immortal chapter 
in the Parliamentary history of every modern 
European state. It is certain that in the beginning 
the newspapers, and even the Irish people, spoke of 
" Bio-o-ar and Parnell," rather than of " Parnell and 
Biggar." My own conclusion is that it was Biggar 
who, in the joy with which he paid back the 
insolence of the House of Commons, first discovered 
what an instrument of torture systematic obstruction, 
placed in the hands of a few resolute men, might be ; 
but it was Parnell who perceived that the new 
weapon was not merely a means of inflicting a school- 
boyish vengeance on an obnoxious member whose 
Bill was blocked, or an overbearing majority whose 
dinner was spoiled, but was capable of dislocating 
the entire machinery of Government at will, and, 
consequently (for he always looked to the practical 
results), gave to a disarmed Ireland a more formid- 



26o WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap 

able power as against her rulers than if she could 
have risen in armed insurrection. These far-seeing 
designs did not agitate Biggar ; still less did it ever 
occur to his simple and upright soul to speculate as 
to what was his own share of merit for the invention. 
In politics, as in his own bacon trade, he was simply 
a man of business, honest as the sun and stern as 
the multiplication table. It was enough for him to 
see he had only to brave the hatred of the House of 
Commons and talk excellent common-sense of the 
most abysmal dulness by the hour, to see powerful 
Ministers wince, and cause a Parliament, that wanted 
to hear nothing of Ireland, hear of practically nothing 
else every night of their lives, and he set himself to 
his task " unshaken, unseduced, unterrified," with 
the same conscientious assiduity with which the 
Chaplain read out the prayers before business. 
Once in a way, Biggar showed some trace of the 
pawky humour of the Scoto-Irish race from which 
he sprang. After he had made himself hoarse with 
three hours' speaking, consisting chiefly of readings 
from Blue Books, the Speaker, hoping to bring him 
to a close, intimated that he really could not hear 
what the hon. member was saying. " Quite right, 
Mr. Speaker," was the bland response ; " the acoustic 
properties of this House are something shocking. 
I will come nearer." And, gathering up his Blue 
Books and documents, Biggar cheerfully trotted off 
to the front Opposition Bench, and, to oblige Mr. 
Speaker, began his oration all over again da capo. 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 261 

He was, without exception, the most fearless 
man I ever met. Others, greatly fearing, might 
defy their fears ; to him there was no merit in fear- 
lessness, inasmuch as the sensation of fear was 
simply inconceivable, like a missing sense of smell. 
When he " espied strangers " on an historic occasion, 
for the purpose of having the Prince of Wales 
turned out of the Gallery, he enjoyed the looks of 
rage and hate darted at him from the eyes of five 
hundred horrified colleagues, as another man would 
enjoy a fine wine. It was business, and not in the 
kast a mere elfish delight in worrying the Prince, 
as slow-witted Englishmen supposed. In later 
and happier years, when it was equally good busi- 
ness for Ireland, he walked into the Lobby with 
a beaming face to vote an addition of ^30,000 a 
year to the Prince's income. Rude he was in 
speech as a William of Deloraine, but rudeness was 
his war-time armour and not his inmost nature. 
His brutality to Gladstone sometimes stirred the 
Liberal Party to fury. He once, when the great 
old man was referring with paternal fondness to 
his son Herbert, suggested that the Premier could 
not do better than "apprentice young Hopeful to 
Marwood " (the hangman) "for service in Ireland." 
On another occasion, when we had been by files 
and platoons raking the Irish Secretary with a 
severity only less barbarous than his own Coercion 
Act, Gladstone, who had been listening with a face 
of anguish, started up to make one of his pathetic 



262 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

appeals for mores humaniores between the two 
peoples, which melted the hearts of the most reck- 
less of our rough-riders. "Hon. members," he said, 
in one of the softest stops of his noble organ-voice, 
" will perhaps give more indulgence to my appeal 
because, in the nature of things, I cannot hope that 
this voice will be heard much longer in this House." 
" Hear, hear ! " rang out Biggar's harsh crow of 
exultation, horrible as a pistol-shot in the midst of 
the solemn hush. I am bound to say that the cry 
instantly cut short the Grand Old Man's sublime 
flight, and brought him down to the level of poor 
human frailty. His lion-head pricked up, as at the 
smart of a bullet-wound, and it was with a face 
of scarcely more sweetness than that of his grim 
antagonist he proceeded : " I note the expression 
of subternatural glee which sits upon the visage of 
the hon. member for Cavan." To which the hon. 
member for Cavan responded with another " Hear, 
hear ! " of perfect satisfaction. 

But neither Gladstone nor the indignant House 
yet knew " the heart-wood " of the real Biggar 
underneath the gnarled bark. There were few 
things more touching in the hard relations of 
Parliamentary life than the shy tenderness with 
which, in the days of Gladstone's Home Rule struggle 
and of his defeat, Biggar would sidle up to Mr. 
Herbert Gladstone and whisper : " Hope your 
father is well, mister ? Glad to hear it, mister ! " 
A far more severe trial of his patriotism was to 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 263 

relinquish obstruction when obstruction had done 
its work. The old Adam so far survived that when 
he himself subsided into one of the most decorous 
and unobtrusive supporters of the Home Rule 
Government, he would instruct the young men of the 
Party, by the half-dozen, how to block the Bills 
of obnoxious private members, and sit quietly 
chuckling, like a hen-mother over her chicks, when 
after midnight his catechumens, one after one, raised 
their hats with the fatal " I object." Once, in the 
height of our wars with Mr. Balfour, Biggar came 
up to Dr. Tanner (one of his most promising Aleves), 
as the House was breaking up after the Session, and 
said, " Dr. Tanner, I understand you're going to jail 
for the winter?" " Yes, Mr. Biggar, I daresay I will," 
was the somewhat startled reply. " That's all right," 
pursued the other without changing a muscle; "but 
it would be advisable you should get into jail as 
quickly as you can, so that you may be out in time 
to attend to your blocks when the House meets." 
He, in reality, was more concerned for Dr. Tanner's 
prison sufferings than was the genial doctor himself. 
I have heard, and can easily believe, that when the 
prison experiences of another of his colleagues were 
under discussion, there v/as a tear trembling in his 
eye. In his Obstruction days he found the material 
for many an hour of dreary speech-making in the 
case of a mysterious " Mr. Clear." On the Naval 
Estimates and on every conceivable occasion " Mr. 
Biggar — to call attention to the case of Mr. Clear" 



264 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

— became a standing heading in the Orders of the 
day. The House, who never Hstened to Biggar's 
two-hour explanations, had a suspicion that Mr. 
Clear was in the position of Sairey Gamp's friend, 
Mrs. Harris, and that "there was no sich a person." 
Mr. Clear, however, was a perfectly authentic 
personage, a poor inventor who had been scandal- 
ously treated by the Admiralty, as inventors will so 
often be. The poor man used to glide into the 
Lobby, like a pathetic ghost, to listen to Biggar's 
sympathetic exposition of his grievances, and there 
is every reason to believe that Biggar's stealthy 
generosity, as well as sympathising tongue, did 
much to console Mr. Clear for the trials of genius 
and the niggardliness of the Admiralty. The time, 
indeed, came when the West Cavan ogre became all 
but as great a favourite in the House of Commons 
as in West Cavan, without ever abating a jot 
of his principles or softening a consonant in his 
uncompromising style of speech. Even with the 
Three Judges of the Parnell Commission, he who, 
according to the " Parnellism and Crime " tracts, was 
to be one of the worst of the criminals, came 
to be one of the Court's prime favourites. He 
defended himself, and whenever the spirit moved 
him, would start up and fling out his eye-glass to 
harpoon the attention of Sir James Hannen, and 
then, with one thumb gracefully inserted under the 
armhole of his waistcoat and the other hand 
wielding the glasses, would launch out into one of 



XI GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880 265 

those quaint, candid, indomitable little speeches of 
his, repeating with interest every sentiment that 
horrified the Times, but doing so with a pellucid 
honesty that made the Court thankful to be face to 
face with the Irish Difficulty in all its reality and 
sincerity, for better, for worse. If Biggar did not 
live to see the full fruition of his country's hopes, 
he enjoyed one blessing which was denied to every 
other Irish Leader, since King Brian Boroimhe, who 
went before him or has followed him — he died in 
the arms of victory. On the night he died, he had 
only just come home from the House of Commons, 
where he had acted as the successful teller in a 
Division in which a majority of the members of the 
House of Commons, convinced Home Rulers and 
no less convinced of its approaching triumph, were 
with him in the Lobby, where he had so often been 
one of a group of half-a-dozen friendless and detested 
pariahs. Wolfe, on the victorious Plains of Abraham, 
had not a happier ending. 

Ireland has never wanted leaders : this was only 
the second time for a century when she found A 
Leader. I have already disposed of the fiction that 
Parnell created, or even to any great extent chose, 
his men. It might as well be said that Mirabeau 
or Danton or Napoleon created the French Revolu- 
tion. There was another fiction current in later days, 
and still more baseless, that it was to the ability 
of his lieutenants, rather than to his own, that his 
success was due. The absurdity of this contention 



266 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xi 

will be made abundantly evident in these pages. 
From the country's throes came forth a staff of 
astonishing brilliancy and variety of talent. They 
formed a wonderful bundle of rods, but Parnell 
was not merely the thong that held them together, 
he was the keen blade of the axe that gave them 
half their force. If, when at last the bond fell 
asunder, it was found possible with infinite pains 
to reconstruct our Irish fasces from the same 
material, the success, such as it was, was due to 
Parnell's unenvious gift of developing all the several 
capacities of his lieutenants and opening up to them 
freely a road to the affections of their countrymen. 
They were Neys and Murats lighting up the battle- 
field with many a glittering charge, but, for the five 
first years at all events, his was the eye that 
measured the ground, and he was the Leader of 
chilled steel that planned and won the battles. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE ROCK OF CASHEL AND ITS ARCHBISHOP-KING 

1880 

The danger of Famine continued until the end of 
July 1880, and was only warded off by the distribu- 
tion of more than ^500,000 worth of food (mostly 
Indian meal) by the various Charitable Committees. 
The terror of starvation, and the heartlessness with 
which the landlords strove by distraints for rent and 
evictions to appropriate to themselves the relief 
intended by charitable subscribers for hungry 
women and children, caused the Land League agita- 
tion to overspread the country with the fierceness 
of a forest fire. Parnell's watchword at the West- 
port meeting, " Keep a firm grip of your home- 
steads ! " followed by his fresh watchword, " Hold 
the harvest ! " as soon as the meag-re harvest of that 
autumn was gathered in, ran through the people's 
ranks with the electric force of one of Napoleon's 
Orders of the Day to his armies. 

It is not generally remembered that the existence 
of the Land League from its formation to its sup- 
pression covered only the short term of two years, 

267 



268 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

and that Mr. Davitt was only left on the scene of 
the agitation for fourteen months of that period ; 
but he utilised his brief period of activity with 
indefatigable energy in the Western agitation, and 
to still more effect in setting important auxiliary 
forces in the United States in motion. The motto- 
programme of the agitation : " Ireland for the 
Irish, and the Land for the People!" was for the 
first part taken from the old cry of O'Connell, and 
for the second, from the new evangel of Mr. Henry 
George. That happy phrase " The Land for the 
People ! " bore three different meanings for as many 
differing schools of agitators. For the mass of the 
Irish tenantry, as well as for Parnell and his Parlia- 
mentary followers, it meant the conversion of the 
450,000 rent-paying tenants into proprietors of their 
own holdings by State purchase ; for the small 
holders of the province of Con naught, among whom 
the agitation originated, it meant not merely the 
purchase of their existing holdings, which were too 
small and poor to support life, but the restoration to 
the people's use of the enormous tracts of rich 
grazing lands from which their fathers had been 
extirpated in the hideous " Clearances " of the Great 
Famine (and of this special problem there was no 
particular mention in the original programme of the 
Land League, nor was it, indeed, understood at all 
for many years afterwards outside the cabins of the 
congested districts) ; and " the Land for the 
People" had still another meaning for Mr. Davitt, 



AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 269 

for whom it spelled Nationalisation of the Land 
as contemplated in Mr. Henry George's enticing 
dreams. Mr. Davitt, indeed, openly dissented from 
the principal operative clause of the original Land 
League programme, which laid down Twenty Years' 
Purchase at Griffith's Valuation as the basis of 
Land Purchase. This was his first serious conflict 
of opinion with Parnell. He did not, however, air 
his dissent in public, and was content to hold his 
own views in reserve, while the great common 
programme of the Abolition of Landlordism was 
going forward. To the Irish tenantry, for their 
part, neither then nor ever afterwards, was National- 
isation of the Land anything but an abstraction. 
What they understood and loved in Mr. Davitt was 
not the philosopher — more often than not he spoke 
above the heads of his listeners^ — but the one- 
armed Fenian chief, the darling son of their own 
Mayo, evicted like themselves, saturated with a 
hatred of Landlordism as fierce as their own, return- 
ing untamed by penal servitude to the old struggle, 
by new methods, perhaps, but with the old uncon- 
quered men gathering behind him. They followed 
and worshipped the man, without comprehending, or 
indeed heeding, the theories, which, for the rest, 
whatever they might be, were sure to be generous 
and single-minded. 

Almost every one of the twenty or thirty public 

1 Parnell used to say, " Davitt would get stoned by the farmers, 
only he talks Greek to them." 



270 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

speeches he delivered in Ireland before he was 
thrust back into penal servitude was occupied largely 
with denunciations of agrarian crime, and expressions 
of abhorrence of those forms of barbaric vengeance 
into which men in the more backward and hunger- 
driven districts were sometimes betrayed in their 
first fury, before any regular organisation was formed 
among them to inspire them with confidence in law- 
ful and bloodless agitation.^ It is an indelible dis- 
grace for English government in Ireland, that the 
reward of the man who thus specially signalised 
himself by an incessant war upon crime, and by 
exhortations which some of his friends, perhaps, 
considered excessive, to the Irish people, to place 
their confidence in the Democracy of England, was 
that, after little more than a year's exertions upon 

1 An amusing instance may be related of the difficulties of Mr. 
Davitt's missionary labours in the disturbed districts. He once 
made a journey to the South of Ireland to inveigh against a series 
of moonlighting outrages which were being exploited in the English 
Press to the prejudice of the Irish Cause. The principal form outrage 
had taken in the district was the destruction of emergency cattle, 

with which Lord was grazing evicted farms on his property. 

The moonlighters took the ingenious vengeance of eating as well as 
killing the cattle, so as to deprive the evictor of compensation for 
the loss of the cattle, by destroying all evidence that they had been 
killed. After a speech in which he denounced the moonlighters 
roundly to a crowd, who listened to him in a respectful but some- 
what incredulous silence, Mr. Davitt was entertained at dinner in the 
local hotel. After dinner he was waited upon by a group of stalwart 
young men, the ringleader of whom said : " That was a fine speech 
of yours to-day, Mr. Davitt. You were a bit hard on the boys, but 
they have no grudge against you for it. I hope you made a good 
dinner, anyway." " Never ate a primer piece of beef in my life," 
replied the visitor. " I'm not surprised at that," remarked the 

moonlight captain ; " it was the best cut off one of Lord 's 

bullocks ! " 



XII AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 271 

the Land League platform, Mr. Davitt was suddenly, 
without trial, and even without the allegation of a 
new offence, carried off from Ireland, and remitted 
to penal servitude in Portland Prison, on a mere 
technical withdrawal of his ticket-of-leave, to the 
indescribable anguish and indignation of his fellow- 
countrymen. The scene in the House of Commons, 
when Sir William Harcourt announced that Mr. 
Davitt had been reconsigned to a common felon's 
cell, and when almost the entire House, in one of 
those fits of brute animal passion that will sometimes 
carry away even the most civilised assemblies, hailed 
the announcement with approving yells, did more 
than a generation of secret conspiracies could have 
done to associate England in the Irish imagination 
with a stroke of cowardly and squalid vengeance 
upon an all too generous adversary.^ Sir William 
Harcourt was, personally, a kind and even tender- 
hearted man. By his orders, Mr. Davitt's new spell 
of penal servitude was a very different experience 
indeed from the old. He was supplied with books 
in abundance, and was allowed to while away his 
time in cultivating the garden of the Governor of the 
prison. But the mischief had been done when an 
eminent Irish public man was struck down as a 
ticket-of-leave man amidst the cheers of the House 
of Commons. That he should have been sub- 

1 The effect upon myself was that I instantly offered myself to 
Mr. Egan for any post of danger in which I might be useful. I was 
in such a state of health at the time, however, that he replied : " My 
dear boy, if you want to go to your own funeral, we don't — just yet." 



272 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

sequently treated not as a ticket-of-leave man but 
as a political prisoner is more creditable to the 
hearts than to the logical consistency of his captors. 
The outrage took place in the eyes of all the world ; 
the official act of contrition was made in secret, and 
the seeds of misunderstanding and blind hatred 
between the two peoples had been sown broadcast 
in the meantime. 

It is possible that the greatest practical service, 
next to the example of his own unselfish life, which 
Mr. Davitt rendered to the Land League move- 
ment was, that he was the means of attracting to 
the movement the enormous revolutionary force of 
Mr. Patrick Forde's famous newspaper, the Ii^ish 
World. No man and no newspaper was ever the 
subject of wilder misunderstanding or more savage 
calumny than Mr. Forde and his organ. The pre- 
valent English belief that he was the paymaster of 
the Land League, and dictated its policy, is an 
absurdity which could only have imposed upon the 
credulous public that was taken in by Richard 
Pigott's forgeries. The great bulk of the American 
subscriptions to the Land League and its successors 
came from people who heartily disliked Mr. Forde's 
extreme opinions. One of England's fatal mistakes 
about Ireland is to suppose that the mass of the 
Irish in America are either revolutionarily-minded 
or irreconcilable. It is only outbursts of irrecon- 
cilability in England's own Press and Parliament that 
a:ive the Irish- American revolutionists their force. 



AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 273 

Nay, Mr. Forde himself, and his journal, ever since 
Gladstone proved the possibility of reconciling Irish 
National aspirations with the British connection, have 
been the most steadfast moderating forces, and the 
most consistent advocates of a reasonable international 
settlement, upon which Gladstonian statesmanship 
could have counted in its most sanguine dreams. 

But at the time I am writing of, neither Eng- 
land nor even Gladstone knew so much as that 
there was an Irish Difficulty to be coped with. 
Nothing less than the ringing of every revolu- 
tionary bell an Irish hand could tug at would arouse 
them. The storm-bell of the IrisJi World boomed 
across the Atlantic with a very audible note of 
alarm indeed, that was heard in every mountain- 
glen in Ireland. There was scarcely a cabin in the 
West to which some relative in America did not 
despatch a weekly copy of the Irish World, flaming 
all over from the first line to the last with pictures 
of the havoc wrought by Landlordism, and incite- 
ments to Irish manhood to lie down no longer like 
a herd of starving mendicants in a land of plenty. 
It was as if some vast Irish- American invasion was 
sweeping the country with new and irresistible prin- 
ciples of Liberty and Democracy. The effect of 
the Irish World's teachings was all the greater 
because there was no considerable journal in Ireland 
at the time which gave the League more than a 
spasmodic and half-hearted support. I should cer- 
tainly be disposed to place the influence of the 



274 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Irish World higher than that of either meetings 
or speeches, in Parliament or out of it, in giving the 
first wild impulse towards the Agrarian Revolu- 
tion, which has since shattered all the towers and 
ramparts of Irish Landlordism into the dust. The 
man who forced the thunders of the Irish World 
was scarcely less remarkable than his paper, and 
remarkable all the more because his modesty and 
taciturnity have kept him unknown outside a narrow 
circle of enthusiastic friends. A small, dingy, silent 
man, with the careless soft hat, the close-cut beard, 
and husky voice and deep earnest eyes of the late 
Joseph Cowen, but without a spark of that orator's 
wizard gift of speech — for Patrick Forde is probably 
the only man, who ever exercised any considerable 
influence over the Irish race, who has never made 
a public speech and shrinks from the platform as 
from a public pillory. He Is one of those types of 
solemn, self-immolating, remorseless, yet intensely 
religious natures to be found more frequently among 
the revolutionists of Russia than of Ireland ; whom 
you might expect to see either recommended for 
beatification as a saint or blown up by an infernal 
machine fired by his own hand, in a cause which for 
him has the sacredness of a religion. His excesses 
were those on which England has been willing to 
turn a not unindulgent eye in the case of a Mazzini 
or a Stepniak, of an enslaved Italy or an enslaved 
Russia. The truth is, that any one of half-a-dozen 
English journals of eminence it would be easy to 



AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 275 

name has done more to create blind prejudice and 
bad blood between the two races than the Irish 
World in its bitterest hour. It will perhaps astonish 
Englishmen still more to be told that, next to Parnell 
and Gladstone, they owe to Mr. Patrick Forde more 
than to any other living man the conversion of an 
entire Irish-American world of enemies to a spirit of 
friendliness of which the vote of " the predominant 
partner " herself alone forbade the consummation. 

Mr, Davitt's personality was the most powerful 
factor in giving the Land League agitation its first 
grip of the West. It may be doubted, however, 
whether the movement would ever have attained 
national proportions, only for the giant figure that 
arose in the South, to broaden the issue from one 
that affected the famine-stricken to one that enlisted 
the interest of every man in the nation, and to rouse 
the major portion of the Bishops and priests into 
an ardent participation in the infant agitation, 
which they had at the outset regarded with sus- 
picion and dislike. On the occasion of the first 
Land League meeting in Ballyhaunis, even so 
eminent a popular champion as Archbishop Mac- 
Hale of Tuam (O'Connell's Lion of the fold of 
Judah) stigmatised Mr. Davitt and his companions 
as "a company of unknown strollers." When I 
travelled through the county of Tipperary, a few 
months after the first meetings in the West, the 
Mayo movement had scarcely been even heard 
of, except through two or three sparse reports of 



276 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

speeches in back pages of the Freeman. I found 
that the progress of foreign competition in the 
butter and cattle trades had created as much dismay 
in the South as the destruction of the potato crop 
in the West, and my own letters, perhaps, did 
something to fix men's thoughts upon the common 
danger, and rally them to a common standard. I 
spent more than one evening over the Archbishop's 
cheery fire in Thurles, relating my own experiences 
in the West, and explaining to him the mighty 
and mysterious forces that had been unloosed there. 
But many months were yet to pass before Arch- 
bishop Croke's historic " Visitation " of his vast 
Archdiocese raised the whole southern half of Ire- 
land into a religiously -minded revolution (not 
altogether unlike his own early experiences of the 
Paris of '48) at the signal of his resounding voice, 
and under the shield of his great name. 

It was my fortune to accompany him in that 
famous expedition, which gives a singularly striking 
illustration of that alliance of religious and national 
fervour — his enemies would suggest of the Altar 
and the Revolution — which it was the purpose of 
Dr. Croke's life to perfect, and of which he was 
himself the living embodiment. The "Visitation" 
was the ordinary triennial episcopal journey from 
parish to parish for the Confirmation of children 
and the investigation of the state of religion and 
morals in the parish. Nothing was further from 
his thoughts, when he set out from his house in 



AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 277 

Thurles, than that his journey should turn out to 
be the most momentous series of political manifest- 
ations since the Monster Meetings of O'Connell. 
I know, with a reporter's certainty, that he had not 
prepared a line of the ringing speeches which he 
had to pour out to excited multitudes, sometimes 
twice and thrice a day, for three weeks. But the 
country was in the throes of a contest for its life 
and could hold its peace no longer, and it turned 
instinctively for the Word to that massy-shouldered, 
fearless man, who towered aloft even in the midst of 
men of the towering Tipperary breed, and in whose 
stout hands the crozier shone with the gleam of a 
consecrated sword. It was a season of delicious 
early summer in perhaps the most favoured region of 
Ireland. In the first country parish he approached, 
the entire population turned out on the roads, with 
green boughs and banners, took the horses from 
the Archbishop's modest carriage, and drew him 
with loving embrace to the church door, where they 
showered addresses of welcome at his feet. And there, 
in his purple-edged soutane and biretta, his voice 
stirring as the neigh of a war-horse in the battle, his 
keen blue-grey eye flashing back the people's own 
enthusiasm and love, he would boldly tell them of 
their God-given right to the first-fruits of the land 
they tilled, and of his own readiness to testify, if 
needs be with his life, to the justice of their cause. 
And then the wondrous spectacle, only possible in 
Ireland, was seen of these multitudes, with revolu- 



278 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

tion in their eyes, frantic with the excitement of the 
wild Tipperary whoop, all of a sudden falling on 
their knees with bared heads to receive the blessing 
of their Archbishop ; and a quarter of an hour after- 
wards congregated in the church in their religious 
Confraternities and Sodalities, listening as reverently 
as the children awaiting Confirmation while the Arch- 
bishop delivered his religious exhortations, or perhaps 
his stern denunciation of some parish scandal, in 
the extremely rare cases where even his penetrating 
eye could discover any scandal to be rebuked. 

The example spread from parish to parish, until 
the whole Archdiocese, covering the richest dis- 
tricts of Tipperary and Limerick, was day after day 
throbbing with mighty demonstrations, and listening 
to speeches of straightforward courage and fiery 
logic, which were read the next morning with almost 
equal excitement in every corner of the country. 
One of those scenes in particular will always dwell 
immutably in my memory. It was a heavenly even- 
ing in early June on the Rock of Cashel. Behind 
rose the classic ruins of the Cathedral and Palace 
of the ancient bishop-kings of Munster. For many 
a mile in front spread the deep green pastures 
and cornfields of the Golden Vale (the scene that 
prompted Cromwell to cry out, " Here's a land 
worth fighting for ! "), until they melted away under 
the faint blue line of the Galtee Mountains. The 
air was heavy with the perfume of the hawthorn 
hedges, and the light of the evening sun over the 



XII AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 279 

beautiful plain and its mountain borders was divine. 
The Archbishop stood on a height on the face of 
the Rock, in his violet vesture, surrounded by the 
priests of Cashel and Emly, whose magnificent 
physique often led him to boast that Frederick the 
Great would have coveted them for his regiment 
of Guards ; while at the foot of the Rock wound 
an unending procession of the strongest men in 
Ireland, in a cloud of dust through which burst 
forth their wild shouts, the brazen music of their 
bands, and the glitter of their banners. It was as 
if Cormac MacCullinane, King and Prelate of Cashel, 
had arisen from his warrior grave on the Rock to 
lead on the hosts of Munster again for the recon- 
quest of their glorious province. 

When the famous Visitation was over, the Land 
League was the supreme power in Ireland. Dr. 
Croke has been blamed with extraordinary severity 
and even virulence for his part in the Land League 
Revolution. His speeches were habitually treated 
by the viler part of the English press as if they 
were incitements to crime. It is quite certain that 
Mr. Forster once contemplated his arrest under his 
Coercion Act. English influences at Rome were 
exercised for his condemnation with an unscrupulous 
disregard of truth or justice, and with a degree of 
success that, but for Dr. Croke's own strength of 
character, might have eventuated in a conflict of 
evil omen for all that Irishmen hold most sacred. 
Even at home there were not wanting estimable 



28o WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

brethren of his own household to question his 
wisdom, if not to harbour judgments still less 
charitable. The question may be discussed without 
passion, by the dry light of experience, so far as 
there can now be any doubt as to the verdict ot 
history. Every proposition laid down by Dr. Croke 
on his memorable Visitation, ferociously as these 
propositions were assailed at the time, has since 
been transferred from the platform to the Statute- 
Book, even by an English Legislature. The large 
number of Englishmen who, in happier years, came 
to know him among his people and in his own 
house, lived to be completely captivated by the 
contagious warm-heartedness, the breezy honesty, 
the essentially broad and tolerant spirit of the great 
ecclesiastic, whom English journalists, and especially 
English Catholic journalists, were accustomed for 
years to figure to themselves as something akin 
to a monster in episcopal clothing. He had the 
happiness, before he died, of receiving the united 
and truly heartfelt homage of every Prelate of the 
Irish Church, on the occasion of his Silver Jubilee 
as a Bishop.^ Time has proved even to the most 

1 He once exhibited to me, amongst the innumerable gifts of his 
Jubilee day, a chalice of gold of great value, encrusted with jewels. 
" Read that inscription carefully. It is unique," he said. " You'll 
find there the name of every Archbishop and Bishop alive in Ireland 
to-day. That is the first time, in any matter not de Jide, that all the 
Irish Bishops were ever found united in anything, and, please God, 
it will be the last." Their political differences were indeed wide 
and open. At the moment when Dr. Croke was making his famous 
Land League progress through Tipperary, Most Reverend Dr. 
M'Cabe, Archbishop of Dublin, published a pastoral anathematising 



AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 



281 



censorious of them that he had interpreted the 
deepest emotions of the Irish heart more happily 
than they. At a moment when it was doubtful 
whether the Land League would not be dominated 
by the secret societies, who were beginning to 
retort the hostility of the priests with interest, and 
showing many dangerous symptoms of a determina- 
tion to exclude them from the movement altogfether. 
Dr. Croke's courage in trusting the people, and 
throwing himself into the forefront of their perils 
with all the ardour of his big Irish heart, dissolved 
whatever was dangerous in the secret societies by 
leading them out into the open daylight ; and not by 

the " Ladies' Land League," which was founded by some of the 
noblest women in Ireland, as a "dishonouring attempt, under the 
flimsy pretext of charity, to lay aside the modesty of the daughters 
of Ireland," and calling upon his priests " not to tolerate in your 
Sodalities the woman who so far disavows the birthright of modesty 
as to parade herself before the public gaze in a character so 
unworthy a child of Mary." It would be grossly to misread the 
character of Dr. Croke, however, to suppose that his playful hits at 
the political weaknesses of some of his episcopal brethren covered 
any real bitterness, much less any fundamental difference on the 
deeper concerns of religion. Even when the politics of Dublin and 
Cashel were as far apart as the poles, he spoke with reverence of 
Dr. M'Cabe's priestly character, and was one of his most intimate 
friends. He and the Most Reverend Dr. O'Dwyer, Bishop of 
Limerick, also had the liveliest personal regard for one another, 
throughout a period when each entertained a very unflattering 
impression indeed of the other's political friends ; nor did Dr. Croke 
lack staunch political as well as personal allies among the Irish 
Bishops, the most conspicuous of whom were Dr. Duggan, Bishop of 
Clonfert (of whom I shall have occasion to speak again) — a man 
with all the celestial unselfishness of the Bishop in Victor Hugo's 
Miserables and, at the same time, the brain and the fearlessness of 
a great reformer ; and Dr. Nulty, Bishop of Meath, who was 
probably the first representative on the Episcopal Bench of the 
modern Christian Democrat. 



282 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

any methods of spiritual intimidation or intrigue, 
but by force of their complete identification with 
their people's hopes and interests here and here- 
after, restored to the Irish priesthood a position of 
respect and power which was the envy of every 
other Catholic land in Christendom. The split of 
1890, in which the Irish Episcopacy and Parnell 
were locked in a mortal conflict, bitter as was the 
anguish it brought to Dr. Croke personally, was 
the crowning vindication of his wisdom, both as a 
Churchman and as an Irishman. If that great 
convulsion strained to the very snapping-point the 
influence of the Irish hierarchy, it was largely through 
the suspicion that many of the bishops and priests, 
who had conformed to Dr. Croke's policy of identifi- 
cation with the National movement, were only wait- 
ing for the opportunity of tripping Parnell up and 
shaking off the yoke which Dr. Croke had imposed 
upon them. If the side the Irish Bishops took 
proved to be the victorious one. It was mainly 
because Dr. Croke and those of his school, who 
had shared the people's struggles and sufferings, 
were seen to be on that side, and were known to be 
impelled by their stern duty as Irish Nationalists, 
in a moment of awful crisis for the country, as well 
as by their assent in the moral order to the pro- 
nouncement of the Bishops. 

It was one of Dr. Croke's innocent foibles to love 
to be thought rusd. He was sometimes taken at 
his word, even by the less acute of his own order, 



XII AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 283 

to whom his free-spoken championship of revolu- 
tionary men and doctrines was a stumbhng-block,^ 
In reality, he was one of the most simple and straight- 
forward of men. The key to his character was that 
he was as truly an Irish Nationalist as he was a 
Roman ecclesiastic, and could no more understand 
why there should be any question of antagonism or 
separation between the two characters than between 
the brain and heart in his own living body. A 
long residence in free countries — first in the French 
Republic and afterwards among the bold democracy 
of New Zealand — had led him to entertain a 
confidence in popular liberty which terrified timid 
souls, and to laugh at those fears for the safety of 
the Faith which made them uneasy at every breath 
of free discussion. 

" I was charmed," he said, in one of his Visitation 
speeches at Emly, " to see how beautifully and suggestively 
you had blended Ireland's beloved standard of green, 
which has never been sullied, with the Cross that can 
never know defeat. I desire to repeat to-day that, not- 
withstanding the cry now so frequently, and, as I think, 
so needlessly raised, of the Church in danger, I am now 



1 He used to tell against himself, with a zest which was apt to 
scandalise the weaker brethren, a remark he overheard at the 
Thurles Railway Station when seeing off Monsignor Persico, who 
had come on a most delicate mission from the Vatican, and between 
whom and the Archbishop of Cashel there was supposed to have 
been an encounter of deeply Machiavelian, though courteous 
diplomacy. " Look at the pair as sweet as two doves," whispered 
a bystander; "I wonder which is the greater rogue of the two?" 
Events indeed have proved that poor Monsignor Persico no more 
deserved the compliment than his true-hearted Irish host. 



284 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

as ever, and now more than ever, a firm and unwavering 
believer in the lasting fidelity of our people to the dual 
cause of creed and country, being, indeed, thoroughly 
convinced that, should the people ever swerve from their 
allegiance to either or both, the sad event will be caused 
by the weakening of that bond of love which has united 
and still continues to unite the Irish priest to his Irish 
flock." 

The last public speech of his life— that In which 
he returned thanks to the host of bishops, priests, 
and laymen who came to celebrate his Episcopal 
Jubilee^ — deserves to live as the abridged history 
of his life : — 

For once in my life, my lords and gentlemen, I 
cannot avoid being egotistical. I have never broken 
with a friend nor turned my back upon an enemy ; and 
if, at times, though rarely, I had to draw the sword and 
smite a clerical or lay transgressor, it was, I think, 
universally understood that in doing so I felt more pain 
myself than I inflicted on the offender. ... A pledged 
Independent of over forty years' standing, I have never 
courted the smiles of the great nor sought a favour from 
the Government. In religious matters I have never 
questioned the conscientious convictions of any man, nor 
his absolute right to hold his own. Brought up, though 
not bred, for the most part among free peoples, I imbibed 
the love of liberty from my earliest years, and have ever 
been, in heart and act, I own, a rebel against every 
species of tyranny, and thoroughly in sympathy with the 
poor, the afflicted, and the oppressed. Such being my 
natural tendencies, it was to be expected that when 
occasion offered I should take sides with the down- 

1 Thurles, July i8th, 1895. 



AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 285 

trodden tenants of Ireland, and strive, as far as any one 
man could do it, to loose the landlord's grip on their 
throats, and secure for them the right to live and thrive 
in their own land. I joined the National Party at once, 
accordingly, in '79, having first convinced myself that 
the cause they advocated was a just and righteous one, 
and that the men who headed the movement were made 
of the proper mettle. This brought down on me the 
maledictions of not a few, but the blessings of many, and 
if I suffered as I did in consequence, and had to pay 
the penalty in various ways of my advanced views and 
determined action as an Irish Nationalist, I have at all 
times been rewarded a hundredfold by the affectionate 
regards of the people and the steady support of the great 
majority of the Irish priests and bishops. 

I have re-read all the speeches delivered by the 
Archbishop during his famous three weeks' Aposto- 
late. There can be no higher tribute to the fore- 
sight and real moderation of his doctrines than the 
fact that, of all those improvised declarations, 
delivered at unexpected moments, under every 
circumstance of excitement and temptation to be 
extreme, I have not come across a sentence which, 
by the light of what has occurred since, any friend 
of his would desire to see obliterated. The 
speeches, which were treated by the English Press 
as if they were the ravings of some Jacobinical 
Conventionnel en mission, were, in fact, only startling 
because they were elementary truths for the first 
time courageously spoken from a high place. His 
claims for the Irish tenants were even more modest 
than those which both English Parties have since 



286 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

in turn conceded. He was considerate, and even 
sympathetic, for the inevitable losses of the land- 
lords. He insisted upon the honest payment of fair 
rents, he set his face against extravagant demands, 
he preached horror of crime and of the criminal, 
with the determination of one who was no more to 
be cowed by an angry popular shout than by Mr. 
Forster's Warrant of Arrest. 

To read these speeches now, when they seem 
only the picturesque summary of all that the 
Statute-Book has been saying since, and then to 
read the terms of perfectly crazy calumny in which 
they were dealt with at the time in the English 
Press, and by England's emissaries in Rome, is to 
learn an amazing lesson as to the power of mis- 
representation to breed enmity between peoples 
who will one another no wrong. One illustration 
will perhaps suffice to point the moral. One of 
the Archbishop's phrases, "You cannot have an 
omelette without breaking eggs," was caught up by 
the Tifnes and by all the minor landlord Press in 
chorus, as though it were a stealthy incitement to 
murder, addressed by an ecclesiastical monster to an 
audience of assassins. Here is the passage^ which 
gave rise to the calumny, and which, of course, was 
not presented to the English eyes which read the 
gloss upon it : — 

After explaining the provisions of Gladstone's 
Land Act, "which," he did not hesitate to say, "far 

^ Dr. Croke at Thurles, Oct. 9th, 188 1. 



XII AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 287 

surpasses in the breadth and variety, as well as in 
the value, of its provisions any measure previously 
passed into law for Ireland by the British Parlia- 
ment," Dr. Croke urged that all would depend 
upon its administration : — 

The man who labours on the soil, be he farmer or 
agricultural labourer, has the first claim upon its fruits. 
The Commissioners under the Land Act would do well to 
bear this fact in mind, and so to reduce rents all over the 
country as to enable the tiller of the soil to be whole- 
somely fed, fairly clothed, and suitably housed, besides 
making all other needful provisions for himself and his 
family. Whatever remains after that is a fair rent. It 
belongs to the owner of the soil, and the man who with- 
holds it from him does a patent wrong, and is guilty 
of a great injustice. This is the settlement of the Land 
question which Charles Stewart Parnell and the Land 
League are labouring to procure, and this is the only 
settlement that will be deemed perfect and satisfactory 
by the patriotic priests and Bishops of Ireland. Enter- 
taining as I do the kindest feeling towards every class 
of our countrymen, and not wishing to see one section of 
society benefited at the expense of another, I cannot 
conceal from myself that such a settlement of the Land 
question as I have now sketched would entail a very 
serious loss to every landlord, even the best in Ireland, 
while it will be utterly ruinous to some of them. But 
this, I regret to say, cannot be helped. No victory has 
ever been achieved on the field of battle without the loss 
of some valuable lives. You cannot make omelettes, as 
the French say, without breaking eggs, nor can millions 
be emancipated without the humiliation of a few. Now 
it is plainly within the power of the Land Commissioners 
to effect some settlement such as this. Will they rise to 
the level of this great cause ? Will they have the courage 



288 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

of aiming a death-blow at the ascendency of a few, in order 
to secure the birthright and the much-needed elevation 
of the multitude ? Or will they attempt to plaster up the 
sores of the people instead of radically healing them ? 

Here was a statesmanlike view of a difficult 
situation — a view which all parties now confess to 
be the true one— set forth also with a regretful and 
even sympathetic consideration for those whose 
incomes were bound to suffer through the operation 
of an inexorable law. What is to be thought of the 
fair-play of those who, for many years afterwards, in 
the columns of the Coercionist Press and in the 
Parnell Commission Court and in the corridors of 
the Vatican, quoted the Archbishop's "you cannot 
make omelettes without breaking eggs," carefully 
suppressing the fact that it was the Land Com- 
missioners who in his view would have to break 
them, as a sly instigation to murder, addressed to a 
criminal population ? 

On another occasion His Grace received a cutting 
from a Roman journal under English influence, 
which contained the following paragraph under a 
scare-heading : — 

Insurrection in Ireland 

Intelligence has been received of a serious outbreak in 
the county of Limerick. The insurgents occupy in force 
a stronghold known as Ouinlan's Castle, General Lord 
Clarina has been despatched to sit down before it with an 
army corps. A desperate resistance is threatened. 

It was enclosed in a despatch from the Secretary 



AN ARCHBISHOP-KING 289 

of State, saying — " The Holy Father desires to 
be informed without delay, if it be true that the 
rebellion referred to herein has broken out in Your 
Grace's Archdiocese." 

The rebellion story was, of course, as grotesque 
a legfend as that of the omelette. One of Mr. 
Forster's most comical follies as Chief Secretary 
was to dispatch a battalion of the Coldstream 
Guards, by way of "striking terror," to the scene of 
some evictions near Oola in the county of Limerick. 
In the backyard of one of the farmhouses to be 
evicted stood the ruins of an ancient Castle, roof- 
less and dismantled since the days of Cromwell. 
Some practical joker got it into Mr. Forster's head 
that the Castle was really a formidable affair, and 
that a considerable o-arrison was assembled there to 
resist the Sheriff. I happened myself to be present 
at the excruciating scene, when the Coldstream 
Guards of England were drawn out to storm the 
unfortunate ruins. It was one of the most solemn 
practical jokes in history. The battalion of giants, 
with shotted guns, approached the fortress in open 
order, and then, with a rush and a cheer, poured 
through the gaping breaches in the walls. The 
feat was received with an Homeric roar of laughter 
from the assembled crowd, who were in the secret. 
The crestfallen Guards found themselves in an 
empty ruin, under the open sky, without a living 
thing to encounter them except some jackdaws they 

disturbed in the ivy. The one practical result of 

u 



290 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xn 

the expedition was that Tim Quinlan, the poor 
tenant, who never before thought of describing his 
humble home as " Quinlan's Castle," ever afterwards 
bore that proud description as his address. And it 
was this absurd rustic joke — the sorest humiliation, 
perhaps, in the history of the Guards of England — • 
that enabled the whisperers in the alcoves of the 
Vatican to exhibit the Archbishop of Cashel as an 
insurgent chief to an alarmed Propaganda. 

The best testimony to Dr. Croke's teaching and 
to its fruits is that, throughout all the years of the 
Land League struggle, Tipperary, which in all 
previous cycles of disturbance in Ireland had held 
the foremost place for agrarian murders and affrays, 
was not stained by a single deed of blood and was 
wholly free from moonlighting conspiracies or other 
secret societies ; while Dublin, whose Cardinal 
Archbishop had distinguished himself by hostility 
to the open constitutional movement, was the scene 
of the Invincible Conspiracy, and of various assas- 
sinations, or attempted assassinations, only less 
sensational than the murders of the Chief Secretary 
and Under Secretary in the Phoenix Park. It is 
also worthy of remark that, with the exception of 
one small corner, practically the entire Archdiocese 
of Cashel and Emly followed Archbishop Croke in 
the great split of 1890, while Dublin was the centre 
and focus of the resistance to the Bish6ps. 



CHAPTER XIII 

' UNITED IRELAND ' 
i88i 

" The Law of the League " was now, to all intents 
and purposes, "the Law of the Land." Once 
Gladstone realised the gravity of the Irish crisis, 
he framed a Land Bill, inadequate, indeed, to its 
purpose, but still so daring in its proposals as to 
revolutionise completely the law as to the ownership 
of the land of Ireland. If the Act of 1881 did not 
realise in its fulness the programme of the League, 
at least it rendered the fulfilment of that programme 
the only ultimate solution of the problem. The Bill 
swept away the landlords' three darling feudal 
privileges of arbitrary eviction, of raising their 
rents as they pleased, and of forbidding the sale of 
the tenants' occupancy interest. It raised the Irish 
tenant from a tenure more precarious than that of 
any peasantry in Europe to an acknowledged legal 
partnership with the landlord in the ownership of his 
fields ; and it reduced the landlords, from a power 

as unbridled as that of a Turkish Pasha over his 

291 



292 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

slaves, to the position of annuitants, entitled to what 
was decreed by a court of equity to be a fair rent, 
and to scarcely any other vestige of their former 
sovereign privileges. If Gladstone and Parnell had 
only at that time arrived at the mutual understand- 
ing which came a few years afterwards, so that the 
administration of the Act might be committed to 
courageous hands, and the tremendous authority of 
the League devoted to facilitating its smooth work- 
ing, the measure might have saved the two countries 
fifteen years of more or less accentuated civil war, 
and brought the landlords to hail the abolition of 
dual ownership on fair terms as a welcome deliver- 
ance, as well as taken the sting out of all the 
arguments that overthrew the Home Rule Settle- 



ment of i^ 

On neither side, however, was so sane a con- 
ception of statesmanship yet possible. Mr. Forster 
went to Dublin Castle with the most fatal of all 
English delusions, that upright intentions alone 
suffice for the good government of Ireland by a 
stranger. He apparently came to the obstinate 
belief that Gladstone's great measure of emancipa- 
tion for the tenants must, in stern impartiality, be 
accompanied by a Coercion Act, which was to strip 
a heroic act of justice of all its grace and raise up 
a thousand bitter enemies in its path. A better- 
informed man would have known that the crimes 
which the landlord Press and their allies in the 
offices of Dublin Castle kept bawling in his ears 



'UNITED IRELAND' 293 

were in vastly smaller numbers than those recorded 
in any former period of Famine and Eviction of 
the like intensity, and, far from being attributable 
to the machinations of the League, occurred mostly 
in districts to which the League had not yet ex- 
tended the protection of its organisation, or where 
its authority was weakest. Mr. Forster, on the 
contrary, allowed himself to be persuaded that 
the crimes were sufficiently accounted for by the 
speeches of three or four half-witted village orators 
who sometimes clambered on the platform when 
a Land League meeting was dispersing, and whose 
words of gold (received with amusement and derision 
by the crowd) were caught up by the universal 
English Press as the only thing worth recording 
concerning these vast popular manifestations. A 
more profound statesman would have recognised 
that Parnell and his associates spoke for a whole 
people in travail, and would have listened to them 
with respectful attention. Nothing would shake Mr. 
Forster in the conviction that they spoke only for 
" a gang of broken men and reckless boys," and that 
the mass of the Irish people would hail him as a 
deliverer if he ridded them of their leaders. A 
less self-righteous man would have frankly acknow- 
ledged that it was the League and its leaders who 
had roused Gladstone even to the knowledge that 
there was an Irish crisis to be faced. To Mr. 
Forster it seemed the summit of Spartan virtue to 
recommend the Land Act to the Irish people by 



294 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

maligning and trampling down the men to whom all 
the world knew they really owed it. 

The House of Lords had indeed helped him on 
the road to ruin by throwing out the Compensation 
for Disturbance Bill in 1880. It may be doubted 
whether the acceptance of a measure which put so 
very imperfect a check upon evictions could have 
conjured down the storm in Ireland, but its rejec- 
tion by a majority of even the Liberal Peers was a 
direct provocation to civil war, as well as a justifica- 
tion of those who took up the challenge. Had 
Mr. Forster boldly thrown the responsibility on the 
right shoulders, and declined to dragoon Ireland, 
while the Government was excogitating the great 
measure of justice of the following spring, eviction 
might have been more effectively discouraged than 
it could have been by the Compensation for Dis- 
turbance Bill, and the country would have been 
quieted with the prospect of assured redress. What 
he really did was to encourage the evictors, and 
enrage the sorely-suffering people, by a system of 
coercion too feeble to overawe a desperate popula- 
tion, but sufficiently venomous to prejudice them 
against the Land Bill that was to follow it. First 
a prosecution for conspiracy under a rusty mediaeval 
statute, and a hopelessly impracticable method of 
striking a jury panel, was launched against Parnell 
and his principal colleagues in the same court of 
Queen's Bench in which the previous generation of 
Governmental blunderers had arraigned O'Connell. 



'UNITED IRELAND' 295 

From the time the jury was sworn, the traversers 
lost all interest in a result which was foreseen by 
every urchin in the streets of Dublin, but they turned 
the folly of the Castle to account by converting the 
Court of Queen's Bench into a Land League meeting 
in permanent session, startling Dublin with the sight 
of an army of evicted and hunger-stricken tenants 
assembling like spectres to testify to the crimes of 
Landlordism. They stirred the country to subscribe 
an enormous Indemnity Fund for the exposure ; they 
hired a couple of dozen of the most accomplished 
orators of the Irish Bar to repeat and improve upon 
the fiercest diatribes of the Land League demon- 
strations ; 1 and in the end so completely cowed the 
Crown Counsel, that for some days they were in 
considerable trepidation lest the jury should finish 
not by the disagreement which was all along taken 
for granted, but by a death-sentence upon Land- 
lordism sans phrase. The popular merriment at the 
collapse of the prosecution in the Queen's Bench 
was changed into indignation by Mr. Forster's next 
stroke — the spiriting away of Mr. Davitt into penal 
servitude. Blunderheadedness could not well have 
hit upon a more effective device for inflaming every 

1 By a coincidence not unusual in the venal history of the Irish 
Bar, some of the most eminent of the advocates hired by the League 
to praise the traversers were subsequently hired by the Crown to 
prosecute them. One of the most lurid and dithyrambic pleas for 
the Land League was delivered by Mr. Peter O'Brien, who after- 
wards earned the titles of Lord O'Brien of Kilfenora and Lord 
Chief Justice of Ireland, as well as the, perhaps, more enduring one 
of " Pether the Packer " on the Crown side of the same Court. 



296 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

generous instinct of the country, and exciting Irish 
suspicion of any legislative gifts from the same 
unchivalrous hands. 

For a country thus harried by the landlords, 
filled with contempt for the coercionists' failure, and 
angered by their foul procedure against a beloved 
leader, the Session of 1881, which under happier 
stars might have been hailed as the harbinger of a 
blessed Land Reform, opened with a fresh Coercion 
Bill, which combined the maximum of outrage upon 
the Constitution with an inefficiency which was to 
cover its authors with more hatred and contempt 
than even their fiasco in the Queen's Bench or their 
unlucky device for silencing Mr. Davitt. We now 
know from Mr. Morley^ that, to Gladstone's "dis- 
may," Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain were with 
Mr. Forster for the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus 
Act, and that if Gladstone had not "submitted," the 
only alternative would have been his resignation 
and the break-up of the Ministry. The catastrophe 
could only have been avoided if Parnell had been 
treated not as a " village ruffian," but as the leader 
who held the enmity or good-will of Ireland in his 
gift as never Irish leader held it before. But the 
time was not yet. The excellent intentions of the 
most powerful group of Englishmen of the day 
were rendered null and void by the inborn national 
incapacity for governing Ireland, or even under- 
standing her. The Session which was to conciliate 

^ Life of Gladstone, vol. iii. p. 50. 



XIII 'UNITED IRELAND' 297 

Ireland began with a Bill to suspend her rudimentary 
liberties and a Parliamentary coup d'etat to stifle the 
protests of her representatives. When, after the 
famous forty-one hours' sitting, Mr. Speaker Brand 
summarily ordered Mr. Biggar to sit down, and by 
brute force put an end to the resistance of the thirty- 
two Irish members, it was a famous victory for an 
exultant Coercionist Press ; but it sealed the fate of 
the Land Bill as a peace-offering, and roused every 
corpuscle of the hot Irish blood to answer Revolution 
in Parliament by a social Revolution, which neither 
guns nor ships availed to conquer. The bitterness 
of feeling in Ireland was aggravated by the fact that 
Mr. Shaw's section of the Irish members deserted 
their comrades in their resistance to the Coercion 
Bill, and the Freeman hung on Parnell's flank as 
usual, with dubious attitude, in every moment of 
difficulty. The cup overflowed when the Coercion 
Bill became law, and almost the first men whom 
Mr. Forster " reasonably suspected" and threw into 
jail as "village ruffians " were Mr. John Dillon, who 
was, in the eyes of his countrymen, the pattern of a 
high-souled gentleman, and Father Sheehy, one of 
the most beloved priests in Ireland. 

This was the state of affairs when the following 
entry — the last that was to be made for many an 
eventful year — appeared in my diary : — 

Juty -^rd. — An extraordinary letter from Parnell. 
They have purchased The Irishman concern, and he begs 
of me to take the editing and general management on my 



298 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

own terms ! By the same post, letters from Pat Egan, 
James O'Kelly, and T. P. O'Connor, pressing me to accept. 
A few hours later, a wire from Egan, from Paris, " Your 
answer to our proposal must be Yes ! " So it is a concerted 
affair. 

I A.M. Home, after pacing the street for near three 
hours with M'Weeney. Summons has been humming 
through my brain all the day. Sounds a little like a 
death-bell. National journalism in such an upheaval of 
earth and hell as is coming can only end in one way — as 
it always does end in Ireland. The more I turn it over, 
there is no resisting. In such a time, with beliefs like 
mine, not to suffer one's share would be shame. Poor 
mother looked so sad. " Was not our poor Jim enough ? " 
she said, and broke down crying. But she rallied bravely 
— so bravely. " My heart, whatever you think best will be 
the right thing. May God direct you ! " Queerly enough, 
M'W., who is one of the least credulous of politicians, and 
will miss me as he would a son, is clear for acceptance. 
What is there to forbid ? A life of ease and perfect content, 
so far as my surroundings go ; more money than I have 
any use for; friends galore, if I would seek them, or if I 
would only not shun them ; a creepy horror of the mean 
tragedies and scurrilities of Irish public life ! Contra, the 
rebel blood within me ; health so bad that prison or Pan- 
demonium can make it no worse ; the ill-luck of Endymion 
in love ; a lonely home from which the last dear figure is 
fading away at an awful rate ; nothing whatever to live for, 
and a sense of the sorrow of life (and above all of Irish life) 
so oppressive, that even a forlorn hope for our old race, 
and under the right man, seems bliss. M'W. would go on 
repeating, " You have it in you ; give yourself a chance." 
Did he mean ambition ? If he did, never a woefuller 
mistake. I have no more ambition than an earthworm.^ 



^ The only political ambition of which I was ever conscious was 
once when re-reading^ Wordsworth's lines on Wallace : 



'UNITED IRELAND' 299 

Was he thinking of abiHty ? I have some of a sort, more 
or less hebetated by disease and languor of body and soul. 
If I only could be always what I can be sometimes, I 
might serve for something in a poor country that has not 
too much to choose from. . . . There is nothing I am quite 
sure of except that I have a life to risk, and that may be 
something, as things are shaping. My real hesitations are 
two — first, a physical repulsion for the Pigott concern as 
for an ugly disease ; second, and more particularly, how to 
break the news to E. D. G., who, whatever may be his 
political waverings, has been a brother to me, and more. 
He is sure to suspect (rightly) in the new paper a rival, or 
at least a menace. Policeman has knocked to say I had 
left the latchkey in the key-hole. Will he be calling soon 
on other business ? The thought gives me a little shiver. 
He must have seen the Chief and myself tramping up and 
down for hours. I verily believe he took us for house- 
breakers ! To bed ! Wonder has P.'s summons murdered 
sleep ? 

Quel giorno non piii vi leggemmo avanti ! With 
the above entry, like the lovers in the Divine Epic 
after the fated kiss, I shut the book. For fourteen 
years after, I never committed my thoughts to paper 
again, throughout an epoch vi^hen, perhaps, they 

How Wallace fought for Scotland, left the name 
Of Wallace to be found, like a wild-flower, 
All over his dear country. 

" The wild-flower of his native land" seemed so much more enviable 
a form of immortality than a tomb in Westminster Abbey. But that 
daring thought was many years afterwards, and was only a moment's 
folly. When the above was written I certainly ran the earthworm 
close in his ambition for hiding himself in the earth. Of literary 
ambition — of a certain hot flush of faith that I could do something 
with my pen to give Irish life and the Irish cause a grip on human 
sympathy — I had my fill. But that ambition, and how I was cured 
of it, is " another story " — is in itself, indeed, a story of Irish life as 
sad as any. 



300 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

might have been of more pubhc value, barring a few 
memoranda jotted down during the Home Rule 
negotiations of iS86, and again at the opening of 
the Home Rule Parliament of 1892. 

I had not been consulted at all as to the purchase 
of the Pi^ott establishment. Messrs. Parnell and 
Egan had agreed to buy Mr. Richard Pigott's good- 
will, or rather, to buy off his ill-will, for a sum of 
^3000. Except on the basis of a blackmailing trans- 
action, the price was a ridiculous one. The concern 
was not commercially worth three thousand farthings. 
The circulation of the twopenny paper, The Irish- 
fjian, was sinking week by week to zero, and that of 
the penny paper, the Flag of Ireland, had practically 
disappeared. Pigott had been keeping the establish- 
ment going by methods worthy of his subsequent 
performances of Parnell Commission fame. It was 
suspected that the Secret Service Fund was at the 
bottom of his attacks on the Land League from the 
high-souled Fenian point of view. If the suspicion 
is unjust, it can only have been unjust to those 
entrusted with the distribution of the fund. The 
first visit I paid to the office in Lower Abbey 
Street, damp, mouldy, and dilapidated, with bank- 
ruptcy written up everywhere, and a pervading 
atmosphere of unwholesomeness, was made with the 
shuddering sensation of going to dwell in a sepulchre. 
The poor skeletons left of the staff, indeed, seemed 
to suggest, almost as eloquently as the figures of the 
agents' books, and the moist and decaying furniture, 



'UNITED IRELAND' 301 

that it would take another miracle of Lazarus to 
raise the concern from the dead. The one ray of 
hope to be seen anywhere was the foreman printer 
and General Providence, Mr. Edward Donnelly. 
In the midst of a moral and pecuniary leprosy, he 
preserved qualities of honesty and fidelity as incor- 
ruptible as the purity of the Lady amidst the rabble- 
rout of Comus. For several years he had managed 
to keep the sinking ship afloat by all sorts of 
ingenious shifts and economies, and by pledging his 
own modest savings from bank to bank. Mr. 
Donnelly, for whom the new regime with all its 
perils was heaven, continued to the day of his death 
to be one of my most valued helpers and friends. 
But even his face received me with a thousand 
plain signals that I was venturing into the region of 
the lost. 

The blackmail paid by Parnell was not, however, 
without its compensations. It deprived the black- 
mailer of all access to the old Fenian public, less 
numerous, perhaps, than worthy of respect, who 
suspected nothing of Pigott's villainy, but still had 
their own suspicions of Parliamentary methods, and 
their clinging to the old dreams to which they gave 
their hearts, and would gladly have given their blood. 
The ^3000 paid to Pigott, moreover, represented 
the only sum which the new project drew from the 
League Funds. During the three following years, 
when the new paper practically bore upon its shoulders 
the whole brunt of the battle against Earl Spencer's 



302 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

resolute Coercion regime, and against an unparalleled 
series of prosecutions and actions for damages by 
his surbordinate officials, the going expenses were 
covered by a bank overdraft on Parnell's credit, 
and the tremendous success which afterwards, with 
the triumph of Home Rule and Earl Spencer's 
courageous conversion, attended the paper, enabled 
us not only to pay off the overdraft, but to return to 
Parnell payments which had already far exceeded 
the amount paid to Pigott, when the crash of 1890 
brought United Ireland and all else beside it to red 
ruin. The ;^3000 paid for the establishment of the 
new paper was thus, beyond all comparison, the 
most fruitful expenditure to which the funds of the 
Land League were ever applied. 

These vast results, however, were little to be 
foreseen on my first visit to the shipwrecked and 
leprosy-stricken establishment of which I was asked 
to take the helm. But even poor Donnelly's face 
of despair did not frighten me from the plain duty 
of the hour, if, indeed, it did not actually inspirit 
me with the subtle charm of a daring deed. The 
fear of a misunderstanding with Gray, or of finding 
myself committed to a war upon his newspaper, 
was still my principal difficulty, and so I wrote to 
Parnell. He replied saying he quite appreciated 
and honoured my disinclination to part with Gray, 
but again in moving terms urged me to undertake 
the duty. " By doing so," he was good enough to 
write, " you will undoubtedly confer a very great 



XIII 'UNITED IRELAND' '303 

benefit upon the National cause, and a personal 
favour on me." I wrote to Gray, frankly explaining 
the situation, and saying, I need not tell him it was 
not a question of money that could induce me "to 
throw up a position of perfect safety and comfort to 
myself, and a connection that, so far as I am con- 
cerned, has been from beginning to end one of 
pleasure and affection, to launch out into the adven- 
tures that may be now before me. For good or ill, 
as you know, I am a bit of an extremist, and I am 
sure nobody will feel more readily than yourself that 
this is a time when a man with my opinions feels a 
little ashamed not to be taking his part in whatever 
troubles may be going." Gray took the announce- 
ment with characteristic kindness, and relieved me 
of all anxiety as to our future good relations. 

My mind was made up, and all my arrangements 
made for taking up my new post of duty, when, to 
my consternation, I learned that " the Kilmainham 
Party," as the Land League leaders then confined 
in Kilmainham Jail came to be called, were opposed 
tooth and nail to the newspaper project of Messrs. 
Parnell and Egan, and chief among them the man 
who had roused my admiration for his captivating 
and romantic character to a degree only second 
to my enthusiasm for Parnell himself. I was quite 
unprepared for the discovery. Recollections of the 
feuds between the Old Irelanders and the Young 
Irelanders — between the Young Irelanders and the 
Younger Irelanders — between the " Stephens' Wing" 



304 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

and the " Senate Wing " of the Fenian Brother- 
hood, rushed back upon me, and in place of the one 
recompense that seemed possible, namely, the sense 
of battling for a fine ideal by the side of chivalrous 
comrades, I saw myself giving up ease and ambi- 
tionless peace of mind to become a partisan in 
Heaven knew what obscure quarrel between rival 
sections. I wrote to Mr. Dillon without a day's 
delay, to say the news of his hostility to the new 
project had come upon me like a thunderclap, and 
that if I was truly informed as to his feeling, I 
would at once recall my promise to take charge 
of the projected paper. His reply relieved me of 
any apprehension of being a stumbling-block my- 
self, but left me full of uneasiness as to the 
relations between Parnell and his most conspicuous 
lieutenant. 

" I cannot tell you," he wrote from Kilmainham on July 
1 2th, " how much I feel at being impelled by circumstances 
to be the means of putting you in a very unpleasant 
position. ... I have always opposed the project of 
starting a paper when it was discussed at the Executive, 
for reasons which I won't now enter into, but which might 
have been got over, and your accepting the Editorship 
would have met many of them. But a new difficulty has 
arisen within the last two months, of a much more serious 
character — certain members of the L.L. Executive and 
myself on the one hand, and Parnell and the Parliamentry 
section of the Executive on the other — as to the policy 
which should be pursued. During the progress of the 
Land Bill through Committee, this difference has become 
daily wider. I am not quite clear as to what course I 



xiii 'UNITED IRELAND' 305 

shall take when I am set at liberty. But I am quite clear 
that I cannot allow the people to suppose that I regard 
the course adopted by the Parliamentary Party towards 
the Land Bill as satisfactory. You will see, then, that 
it is quite impossible for me just now to allow my name 
to be identified with a newspaper which must of necessity 
put the best face on Parnell's action. In fact, I cannot 
take any steps in politics at present. I cannot as yet 
make up my mind what course I will take when I get 
out. The only point I am quite clear on is that I will 
not do anything which might be interpreted as consent to 
the policy which has been pursued either in London or 
Dublin for the last month. . . . You will understand 
that I do not by any means wish to influence you not to 
go on with the paper. I shall not oppose the paper. It 
is not unlikely that I shall retire from politics. And if 
the paper is to go on, I would rather see you Editor than 
any other man I know." 

Nothing could be more reassuring as a mark of 
personal confidence ; and it is clear enough to me 
now that, in his opposition to the starting of United 
Ireland, as well as, in after years, to the starting of 
the United Irish League, and to the abolition of 
Landlordism by means of a friendly compact with 
the landlords, Mr. Dillon was simply influenced 
by that lack of imaginative insight which is the 
principal element of greatness wanting in his char- 
acter, and which led him habitually to view any new 
line of action, in the constantly shifting circumstances 
of the Irish movement, with a suspiciousness, an 
indecision, a certain revolutionary Toryism of mind, 
which fails to perceive that " old methods " cannot 
always continue to be the most effective ones. The 

X 



3o6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

defect has always been redeemed in the long run 
by his essential good sense, in presence of accom- 
plished facts. After his three years' retirement from 
public life in the depressing times that followed the 
suppression of the Land League, he returned to 
Ireland in 1885 full of respect for the success of 
Parnell's policy. It was the same readiness to 
accept the inevitable which enabled him long after- 
wards to overcome his first hostility to the United 
Irish League, so far as to become the principal 
personage in its management ; and which will, 
possibly, in due course, induce him to regard with 
very different feelings the great Land Settlement 
of 1903, to which he unhappily felt bound to offer 
an implacable resistance. 

I did not at the time understand, if I fully 
understand even now, the peculiar attitude of the 
" Kilmainham Party " towards Gladstone's Land 
Bill ; but one thing admitted of no doubt — I was 
not going to take sides in any intestine quarrel ; I 
was not going to use my pen in writing down any 
section of Nationalists, least of all, any whose 
offence might be that they were too " extreme." I 
so intimated to Parnell in a letter carefully avoiding 
any reference to the Kilmainham communication, 
but avowing my amazement to hear that the new 
enterprise was not to be one of a united Executive. 
In his reply, dated from the House of Commons 
on July 15th, he expressed his regret that he could 
not at the moment cross to Ireland to discuss the 



XIII 'UNITED IRELAND' 307 

matter more freely with all concerned, as it was of 
importance he should remain in London until the 
Bill was through the House of Commons. " But," 
he added, " I think the feeling you allude to would 
not be a persistent one, if the newspaper were 
managred on straig^htforward and advanced lines. 
It will, of course, always be my duty to conciliate all 
sections of opinion comprised in the movement, and to 
see that everything connected with it is conducted 
in such a way as to leave no room for complaint 
of backwardness by any one." He pencilled in 
his own handwriting this postscript: '' P.S. — I am 
quite convinced that the attitude taken by some of 
our friends as regards T/ie Irishman project is based 
upon insufficient information or misapprehension, 
and would not last, and that the paper would have 
the entire support of the Land League." As if he 
felt that even these assurances might not prove con- 
clusive, he telegraphed on the same night pressing 
me to go to London ; and there, an evening or two 
afterwards, in that kind of tete-a-tete in which the 
gravity of his epistolary style was exchanged for 
the sweetly cordial freedom he reserved for those 
who were once for all admitted to his intimacy, he 
dispelled all anxiety as to the object with which 
the paper was to be founded, and as to my own 
unrestrained liberty in managing it. "You know," 
I said, " that if the object is to preach moderation, 
or to save the paper from the Castle, I am the last 
man to be placed at the helm." ** My dear O'Brien," 



3o8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

was the smiling reply, "you are to go as far as ever 
you please, short of getting yourself hanged — or us, 
you know," he added, with a sly allusion to the 
responsibility of himself, Mr. Biggar, and Mr. Egan 
as Directors.^ But this lighter tone was taken only 
after we had been for hours discussing his difficulties 
in conciliating conflicting views as to the Land Bill, 
and the still greater difficulties that were awaiting 
him when the Act should come into force. It was 
so long a sitting that after the theatre-parties who 
had been dining at Romano's Restaurant in the 
Strand came back to supper-parties, we were still 
over our coffee and Parnell toying with his cigarette. 

This house, which was much affected by theatrical 
artistes, and famed for strange Italian viands and 
wines, was, for some inexplicable reason, a favourite 
resort of the lonely Irish leader, who knew no 
theatrical people and cared for no dainties more 
recherche than a Bordeaux pigeon and a glass of 
Rhine wine. And it was characteristic of the man 
that, although he would give no fresh order, and 
would occupy a table until after the last supper-party 
had quitted the place, I never knew the waiter who 
would not hang upon his lightest word, or order, 
more obsequiously than upon the prodigal customers 
who supped off oysters and champagne. 

There were three, if not four currents of Irish 



^ As prosecutions and actions for libel thickened, Parnell and the 
others wisely withdrew from their nominal Directorship. The entire 
responsibility was thenceforward my own. 



'UNITED IRELAND' 309 

opinion as to the Land Bill, with none of which 
Parnell was altogether in agreement, and which 
nothing short of his own strong retaining power could 
have led to converge towards the same channel. 

There was the war-party, who saw in the Bill a 
cunning English device for perpetuating the hateful 
system of Landlordism, which the Land League set 
out to extirpate, root and branch. To these men, 
flushed with the prodigious success of the League 
as a tumultuary movement, and filled with contempt 
for the feeble malice of Forster's Coercion campaign, 
it seemed all but a treason to the people's organisa- 
tion, and to their imprisoned leaders, that Parlia- 
mentarians in London should hold any parley with a 
Bill which, in their eyes, was designed with no better 
object than to cut the locks of the young Revolution- 
ary Samson. The opportunities of the Kilmainham 
Section of the Executive for comparing views to- 
gether daily, and the inevitable irritation with which 
fighting men from behind prison bars regarded 
the interminable debates and small strategy of the 
Parliamentary lobbies, gradually created a state of 
feeling in which any reference to " the Parliamentary 
Party " or its doings was sure to be one of reproach. 

A section of the Young Parliamentary lions, of 
whom Mr. Healy was the most aggressive, repaid 
the contempt of the Kilmainham brethren for Par- 
liamentary methods by a no less extravagant depre- 
ciation of extra-Parliamentary warfare, and of "the 
picturesque patriots" with which his caustic tongue 



3IO WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

identified it. Mr. Healy's own mastery of the Bill, 
and the perfectly voluptuous delight with which he 
revelled in its details, had so far deadened him to all 
broader considerations of National policy that his 
scorn for its opponents knew no bounds. In fact, 
after his leader and the majority of his colleagues had 
resolved to withdraw from the debates and throw the 
entire responsibility for the Bill upon the Govern- 
ment, the wilful young rebel went on to the end 
voting, amending, and debating with an ingenuity 
and a coruscating wit that won the lifelong ad- 
miration of Gladstone, but even at this early hour 
suggested uneasy forebodings to his colleagues. 

But Mr. Healy's attitude towards the Bill was still 
that of a critic and a combatant ; there was a third 
section of the Irish members — the moderadoes, 
under the nominal leadership of Mr. Shaw, whose 
action in crossing over to the Government benches 
was regarded in Ireland as desertion to the enemy 
in the midst of a battle, and whose posture was that 
of unquestioning worshippers of Gladstone and his 
Bill. These men, to whom Gladstone himself in a 
moment of aberration gave the fatal description 
of the "Nominal Home Rulers,"^ were all but as 

^ The nickname damned the Shawites in Ireland but was not an 
altogether just one. Some of them were place -beggars ; but the 
attitude of the majority of them was the perfectly honest, though 
feeble one of men of an older time who could scarcely believe their 
eyes and ears as to the revolutionary character of the concessions 
made by the Bill, and could listen to no argument as to its drawbacks 
in their enthusiasm for its author. It was the case, so frequent in 
our history and so ill appreciated in England, where the warm-hearted- 



XIII 'UNITED IRELAND' 311 

impatient of Mr. Healy's criticism as of Parnell's 
cold abstention. They would have the Bill accepted 
by the representatives of Ireland in mute wonder 
and gratitude. 

There was still another school, of whom Archbishop 
Croke was the most potent spokesman, who did not 
forget that by Gladstone's admission the Bill was 
due not to any foresight of his own, much less of 
his Party or nation, but to the semi-revolutionary 
uprising in Ireland, and the semi-revolutionary vigour 
of her representatives in Westminster ; who knew 
that the success or failure of the Act would depend 
upon the boldness with which the merciless rack- 
rents arbitrarily piled on by the landlords would be 
cut down and the tenants' property in their own 
improvements protected ; who had no sympathy 
either with the servile obeisances of the Nominal 
Home Rulers or with Mr. Healy's incipient rebellion 
against his colleagues, but at the same time recog- 



ness of the race is vindicated at the expense of its judgment. His 
colleagues unmercifully tormented one simple-hearted giant (whose 
son had suffered penal servitude for his part in the Fenian rising and 
only came out to die) who one night, when Gladstone was being baited 
by the young Parnellite toreadors, appealingly cried out, " Wisha, 
don't be too hard upon the poor Government !" It must in justice 
to Shaw himself be stated, that he had the refusal of a Com- 
missionership under the Act at a salary of ^2^3000 a year, the accept- 
ance of which might have saved him from the fate of a broken- 
hearted bankrupt, reduced in his last days from the most prominent 
commercial position in the South of Ireland to scribbling for a 
crust in an obscure London financial paper. His is not the least 
tragic figure in the dark gallery of Irish leaders old and new, in whose 
fate our mores humaniores have wrought little change except that 
the modern Irish leader's heart is broken instead of his neck. 



312 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

nised that the Bill changed the Irish landlord from 
being the most irresponsible autocrat on earth into 
a rent-chargeant, whose annuity was fixed by a 
public authority, and raised the Irish tenant from a 
tenure as precarious as that of the landlords' ground 
game to a joint partnership as secure as the land- 
lords' own. This fourth school recoiled from the 
danger of sacrificing all in a movement of popular 
passion, either through resentment against Coercion 
or through some wild determination to commit the 
country to a No- Rent Revolution, This was the 
view which, underneath all the boisterous passion of 
the platform, was probably the view also of most 
reflecting Nationalists in Ireland, as it was certainly 
that of the mass of the Irish tenantry. Even before 
the Second Reading of the Bill, Dr. Croke wrote a 
public letter, remonstrating with the Party for their 
decision, by a vote of 17 to 12, to leave the House 
in a body and hold aloof from the Division. While 
yielding to nobody in his admiration of Mr. Dillon 
or his indignation at his arrest, the Archbishop 
recalled the consequences to the country of endanger- 
ing the Bill, even before it could be ascertained how 
far it might be amended, and put it to the Party 
" whether, after all, the fact that the Government, by 
arresting Mr. Dillon, had done a wrong and spiteful 
thing, was a sufficient reason why the Irish Party in 
Parliament should do a foolish and even imprudent 
thing to avenge it." ^ The Freeman s Journal, 

1 Freeman's Journal, May 7th, 1881. 



XIII 'UNITED IRELAND' 313 

under the aegis of Dr. Croke's great name, was not 
slow to complicate the difficulties by adding its own 
ambiguous counsels. 

The patience, tact, and firmness with which 
Parnell managed to combine all these jarring 
opinions into a prudent national policy would alone 
be sufficient to dispose of the absurd legend that he 
was a roi faineant, who derived his ideas and his 
fame from lieutenants more capable than he. As a 
matter of fact, he agreed with much and disagreed 
with much that the four schools of thinkers were 
urging, and by a wise eclecticism contrived both to 
save the Land Act and to enhance the fighting 
reputation of his party, under circumstances in 
which no other Irish leader of our time could have 
prevented it from splitting into fragments. He 
treated with an even indulgence the impatience of 
the " Kilmainham Party" and the sharp sallies of 
Mr. Healy ; and while showing a firm front, on one 
side, to those who reproached him with sacrificing 
the revolutionary possibilities of the movement, in 
the spirit of a Parliamentary Opportunist, he did not 
hesitate, on the other hand, to defend the decision 
of the Party to cut themselves free from the 
responsibility for the Bill, in a public reply, in which 
he reminded even so formidable a monitor as Dr. 
Croke that "the Convention deliberately left upon 
us the responsibility of the course to be taken, and 
I am bound to say that, in my opinion, those who 
are on the spot and are witnesses of what is going 



314 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

on day by day can best judge the situation " ; adding 
that while he had taken care to satisfy himself that 
the Bill ran no danger by reason of the abstention 
of the Irish Party on the Second Reading Division, 
" I am bound to urge upon the Party the maintenance 
of an attitude of observation, and further to take care 
that the just claims of the country after its arduous 
struggle, and its many sacrifices, may not be com- 
promised by the too easy acceptance of an im- 
perfect, and in some cases, perhaps, a mischievous, 
measure." ^ 

Parnell said to me that night at Romano's a 
great many things which the time has not come 
even yet for setting fully down. They convinced 
me, at once and for ever, that he was both a more 
extreme man than the loudest of his lieutenants 
and a more moderate man than the weaklings 
who were for ever pining to prostrate themselves 
at the feet of any fair-spoken Government. He 
sent me home with a certitude that discontents 
in either of the extreme sections could not 
seriously disturb the calculations of such a leader, 
and that nobody was less likely than he to give 
up the revolutionary potentialities of the move- 
ment, until they had accomplished a radical and 

1 Parnell to Dr. Croke, May nth, 1881. With a loyalty 
characteristic of him as a friend and as a Nationalist, the Arch- 
bishop wrote a cordial letter in reply, forbearing to press his own 
view further. "You are," he wrote, "the chosen and trusted leader 
not alone of the Irish Parliamentary Party, but of the Irish people. 
I recognise you fully and faithfully as such." 



'UNITED IRELAND' 315 

permanent change in the relations between the two 
countries. 

Three weeks afterwards, on August 13th, 1881, 
appeared the first number of United Ireland. A 
few days earlier, Mr. Dillon had been released from 
prison in broken health. The House of Lords had 
read the Land Bill a third time, after a process of 
mutilation in Committee which no longer left any 
room for the hope that it would prove a final settle- 
ment. The subscriptions to the Land League for 
the week reached the enormous total of ;^2 759, and 
turned the people's thoughts more confidently than 
ever to the resources of their own organisation as a 
more efficacious means of redress than a mangled 
English statute. The paper that made its appear- 
ance at this critical hour was, from crest to spur, a 
fighting organ. In a country where thirty-six shop- 
keepers of Loughrea could be locked up at one 
swoop, without trial, and even without any specific 
charge, because some local policeman chose to prick 
them down as "suspects," the elements of anything 
like constitutional warfare were thrown to the winds 
by those whose special function it was to guard 
them. Whether the new paper would see a second 
issue depended not upon any squeamish regard for 
the liberty of the Press, but upon the calculation at 
the Castle whether to suppress it or to let it alone 
would be the less likely to play the game of a paper 
which manifestly set out with the determination 
neither to take nor give quarter. To all intents and 



3i6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

purposes the paper proposed to create a weekly- 
insurrection in the intellectual order. Not, indeed, 
by teaching the people to look to the force of rifles 
and cannon, which (to cut short all other considera- 
tions) were not to be had. It scoffed at the taunt 
of the landlords that the League " lacked all proper 
spirit by choosing their own weapons and using 
them at their own times, instead of letting their 
enemies have a convenient day for having them 
shot and finished with." As the British Constitu- 
tion was forced upon us at the point of the bayonet, 
popular power in Ireland had only to seize upon it, 
and turn its principles upon the English Parliament, 
and upon its garrison in Ireland, with all the daring 
with which it had been turned against English 
kings by the Barons of Runnymede and the heroes 
of the Long Parliament. "Since it happens to be 
we who are respecting their Constitution, and they 
who are themselves outraging it at every step, it 
is not easy for a bewildered Proconsul to know 
what to do with us." If we had still something 
to learn in order to govern ourselves, the English 
Government had to learn that they could not 
govern us ; and it was proposed to teach the 
grim lesson by turning against every department 
of alien misgovernment in detail the tumultuary 
might which had overturned Landlordism ; to pro- 
ceed from the conquest of the Rent Office to 
the possession of the municipal government of 
the towns ; from the towns to take possession of 



'UNITED IRELAND' 317 

the Poor Law Unions ; from the Poor Law Unions 
to the Counties ; and from the conquest of the 
County Government to the conquest of Dublin 
Castle.^ 

Almost the whole of this ground has been 
traversed since without a cataclysm, and with the 
assent of both English Parties. Dublin Castle 
alone remains not quite conquered. 

It became at once evident that the paper had 
established an electric communication with all the 
active forces of the country. Day and night the 
wheezy old Wharfedale machine, with which we were 
obliged to put up for our first numbers, had to go 
on the whole week through, churlishly supplying 
the feverish demands that were arriving with every 
post. Parnell, who was not easily moved to tele- 
graphing, wired "Wonderful, sparkling all over." 
Egan wrote, bubbling over with congratulations. 
" I have an idea," he facetiously added. "We must 
keep that corner between Sparrow's and the opposite 
corner of Sackville Street for your statue by and by, 
and there from your pedestal, which is going to be 
a tall one, you can keep a watchful eye on Sir 

1 I recall with satisfaction that United Ireland, from the outset, 
was the first to propose that the forces which had emancipated the 
farmers should be turned next to the achievement of equivalent 
advantages for the hitherto unnoticed agricultural labourers, and for 
the revival of Irish industries. The first number began an active 
propaganda under the rubric of " Irish Trade for the Irish Towns," and 
contained letters from Parnell, Archbishop Croke, and the Lord 
Mayor Elect of Dublin (Mr. Charles Dawson), heartily commend- 
ing the idea ; while the labourers, for the first time in their history, 
had a department all to themselves. 



3i8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xm 

John,^ and step round the corner to Mooney's^ of 
a night If you should find immortality too cold a 
business." It was still more gratifying to hear that 
the paper became instantly first favourite with the 
prisoners left in Kilmainham. A high Castle official 
told a legal friend of mine, that he found Mr. 
Forster wading through the first number in his 
office at the Castle, with one hand buried in his 
shaggy hair. " Who on earth is this new mad- 
man ? " was his rueful inquiry. 

1 Sir John Gray, once proprietor of the Freeman^ whose statue 
stands close by. 

2 A famous Dubhn tavern. 



CHAPTER XIV 

KILMAINHAM 
October i88i 

Whatever chances Gladstone's great measure had 
of proving to be a durable land settlement were 
nullified by the amendment of the House of Lords, 
rejecting the tenant's claim to be credited with the 
value of his own improvements in the assessment of 
his rent, and by the choice, as head of the new 
Land Commission, of one of the most amiable but 
one of the feeblest of men. The failure, which was 
attributed by Gladstone to Parnell and by Parnell 
to Gladstone, was in reality due to causes inherent 
in the relations between the two countries which 
neither of them could control. Nothing could 
reconcile the Irish tenants to Landlordism ; nothing 
could reconcile the Irish landowners to see their 
incomes and seignorial rights chopped to pieces by 
a trio of Dublin lawyers ; and the English Ministry 
which would at that time propose the Bill — which 
after twenty years more of civil war was with 
universal assent passed, in 1903 — for expropriating 

319 



320 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Landlordism root and branch would have been 
chased from office with a shout of derision. 

When, indeed, the House of Lords played havoc 
with the principles on which fair rents were to be 
determined, Gladstone gave out a leonine warning 
of resistance. The night the Lords' amendments 
came down for consideration the House of 
Commons was crowded in the expectation of a 
Ministerial defiance and a Dissolution. But that 
the Parliament, which came in for quite other 
purposes on the wave of the Midlothian campaign, 
should be sent to the country again upon an Irish 
issue, as to which all the average British elector 
knew was that Ireland had to be held down by 
Coercion, and execrated the Liberal Coercionists 
even more heartily than she did the House of 
Lords, was a pitch of Quixotism to which not all 
the eloquence of Midlothian could have reconciled 
the party politician of real life. Gladstone was forced 
to make the best of the mutilated Bill, and sought 
to assuage his indignation at the transgressions of 
the House of Lords by still fiercer attacks on the 
transgressions of Parnell for not accepting the 
Lords' mutilations with equal meekness. 

In all his speeches of this period he accused 
Parnell with acrimony of a design to frustrate the 
new Act, through the fear that it would extinguish 
agitation. The Kilmainham Party accused their 
leader no less vehemently, if less publicly, of culpable 
weakness in favour both of the Bill and of the Act. 



KILMAINHAM 321 

In reality, Parnell steered with a master hand be- 
tween the folly by which the Bill would have been 
lost and the still greater peril of the unqualified 
acceptance of an Act stripped of half its virtue by the 
House of Lords, and left at the mercy of landlord 
administrators as to the remainder. He mi^ht have 
wrecked the Bill at various stages of its progress, 
and resisted all the clamour of his rasher colleagues 
that he should do so, because his perspicacity never 
failed to keep before his eyes the inestimable 
principles it legalised. He resisted no less deter- 
minedly the full tide of No-Rent passion at the 
National Convention held after the passing of the 
Act, when he stood almost alone for giving the Act 
a discriminating trial. But the recognition of the 
joint ownership of the tenant was now safely en- 
shrined in the statute ; and, on the other hand, the 
Lords' amendments practically ordering the tenants 
to be rented on their own improvements, and the 
untrustworthy character of the new Land Commis- 
sion (whose Chief Commissioner, Mr. Justice 
O'Hagan, began his career by withdrawing and 
apologising for his own modest description of the 
Act as one whose purpose was to enable the tenant 
"to live and thrive"), convinced Parnell that the 
only possibility of making the new Act work out 
an even tolerable alleviation of the Irish peasant's 
lot was by testing it with caution and with all the 
undiminished potentialities of Agrarian Revolution 

gathered ominously in the background. 

Y 



322 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

One of the new Land Commissioners was a 
Whig lawyer, Mr. Litton, whose appointment 
vacated his seat for the county of Tyrone. It was 
a county where the Orange landlords and the 
Presbyterian Whigs were accustomed to have 
their contests out without any intrusion from the 
spiritless and voteless Catholic Nationalists, who 
nevertheless formed a majority of the population. 
Everybody assumed that the new Whig nominee, 
Mr. T. A. Dickson, a man of amiable and liberal 
character, who, so to say, presented the new Land 
Act as his letter of recommendation, would be 
hailed with grateful acclamations by the loyal 
farmers of the North. That hard-fisted body of 
men, having done nothing themselves to win the 
Act, thought of nothing but turning it to their own 
immediate use, and repudiating any solidarity with 
the Southern and Western rebels to whom they 
really owed it. It was taken for granted that one 
of the first results of the Gladstonian legislation 
would be to make the Gladstonian Liberal Party 
supreme in Ulster. It was, on the contrary, the 
moment chosen by Parnell to unfurl in Ulster the 
flag before which ultimately the last strongholds 
of the Northern Whig Party went down. 

The Queen's assent was no sooner given to the 
Act than Parnell crossed over to Tyrone, and, to 
the dismay of the Party hacks, confronted the 
Gladstonian nominee with a candidate of his own — 
a Unitarian clergyman, Rev. Harold Rylett, who 



XIV KILMAINHAM 323 

had figured in some of the most exciting episodes 
of the Land League wars. It was one of those 
sudden strokes of daring by which Parnell con- 
founded doubting friends and over-confident anta- 
gonists. In vain the Catholic Bishops and clergy, 
amazed by the generosity of the new Act, cap- 
tivated by the gentle and accommodating temper of 
the Gladstonian candidate, and habituated by ages 
of inferiority to seeing their flock humbly hewing 
wood for the Whigs, sought to dissuade Parnell 
from his mad enterprise, and even roundly de- 
nounced him and his Unitarian candidate from 
their altars. Father MacCartan, the parish priest 
of Donoughmore, who has lived to see Tyrone in 
complete possession of the Nationalists, was the 
only priest who could be got to stand upon his 
platforms. In vain a Convention, even of the 
timorous Land League Branches which had been 
formed in the county, besought him to allow Mr. 
Dickson to be elected unopposed. Nothing heed- 
ing, he threw himself and his foremost fighters, 
Messrs. Healy, T. P. O'Connor, and Sexton, upon 
the country ; made the valleys of Tyrone ring with 
Nationalist aspirations that had never been heard 
there since the old wars of the O'Neills ; bearded 
the landlord candidate and the Whig candidate 
with an impartial boldness in their respective dens ; 
and, when the ballot-boxes were opened, left Mr. 
Dickson the victor by only eighty votes, as the 
result of his ten days' raid upon a constituency 



324 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

where three -fourths of the poor Nationahsts were 
excluded from the £\2 electorate. 

The congenital incapacity of England to under- 
stand Irish affairs was seldom better illustrated 
than by the unanimity with which the universal 
English Press, Whig and Tory, hailed the result of 
the Tyrone election as the death-blow of Parnell's 
power in Ireland. They positively raved with joy. 
"A crushing and disastrous defeat!" was the ver- 
dict of the most thoughtful of them, the Pall Mall 
Gazette. " One of the most complete surprises of 
recent Irish politics," quoth the inspired writer of 
the Daily Telegraph. " Absolute and unprecedented 
discomfiture for the party of turbulence and in- 
timidation," sang out the Standard. " Disposes 
finally of Mr. Parnell's pretensions to political fore- 
sight " was the weighty judgment of the Times, 
whose own " pretensions to political foresight " were 
to be subjected to so disastrous a test by the events 
of the next ten years in Ireland. Even at home 
the Treemans yournal cautiously re]o\ced over Mr. 
Dickson's victory, and rubbed vinegar into the wounds 
of the defeated side by an appeal to Mr. Forster to 
mark his magnanimity to beaten foes by releasing 
the imprisoned " suspects," hinting that never was 
"so noble an opportunity of conciliating the Irish 
people." Parnell's own notion of his " absolute and 
unprecedented discomfiture " was characteristic of 
the man. He travelled straight from the declara- 
tion of the poll in Tyrone to the neighbouring 



XIV KILMAINHAM 325 

constituency of Monaghan, whose Whig represent- 
ative was about to accept an Assistant Land Com- 
missionership. He then and there announced that 
he should be prepared to offer a NationaHst candi- 
date for Monaghan, and for every other constituency 
in Ulster, against all comers. Whig or Tory, and 
roused such a spirit that it was announced two days 
after that the Whig placeman had renounced his 
Land Commissionership, " in the present state of 
affairs," rather than risk another contest such as had 
sealed the fate of Whiggery in Tyrone. Parnell's 
raid on Tyrone, which to the short-sighted was a 
blunder and a defeat, was in reality the revelation 
of a larger policy, and the annexation of a new 
province which had hitherto been the undisputed 
possession of the nominees of English parties. 

The situation was, indeed, full of perils, which 
might well have daunted a less resolute spirit. 
While Parnell was carrying on his doubtful struggle 
for Tyrone, Mr. Dillon was entertained at a 
banquet in Dublin, at which he announced, to the 
dismay of many of us, his retirement from Irish 
affairs. His health was indeed so much shattered 
that nobody would have been surprised by his 
determination to seek a few years' retirement in 
the United States ; but his speech left no doubt 
that considerations of health alone would not have 
decided him if grave differences of opinion as to 
the whole policy of the Party, in reference to the 
passing of the Land Act and its influence on the 



326 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

future of the movement, had not arisen between 
him and his leader. These differences he shadowed 
forth in his speech at the Rotunda banquet, with 
the deHcacy proper to his high and chivalrous 
patriotism, but also with a gravity which left no 
doubt of their seriousness. 

" I will recall your attention," he said, " to the fact that 
when the Land Bill was first made public, I immediately 
adopted an attitude of uncompromising hostility towards 
it, and up to the time of my arrest I used whatever in- 
fluence I had with the people of this country to secure 
that this Bill should be rejected with contempt, as a 
measure entirely inadequate to meet the necessities of 
the hour, and to satisfy the just demands of the people. 
I was influenced to adopt this course chiefly by two 
reasons — firstly, I feared that the passage of such a 
measure would render it much more difficult to carry on 
the movement of the Land League, because it would tend 
to divide the power of the nation by giving benefits to 
some individuals, by holding out to others the promise of 
benefits, which hopes might be doomed to disappointment, 
and by shutting out a third section of the people in the 
cold with no benefits at all. I feared, secondly, that if 
those Members of Parliament who are identified with the 
League devoted themselves during the long period which 
this Bill would be passing through Committee in trying 
to work improvements in it — I feared that the attention 
of the people would be inevitably and irresistibly turned 
towards London, and towards the Bill, and that the in- 
tensity of the agitation in Ireland would, as a natural 
consequence, become abated. But I had another and 
even stronger motive in asking the Irish people to reject 
this Bill, and to trust entirely to the enormous power 
developed by the Land League movement in this country. 
From the moment the Bill was published, I believed, and 



XIV KILMAINHAM 327 

I still believe, that upon its becoming law an entirely new 
situation would arise in this country ... in which it 
would be infinitely more difficult, if not impossible, for 
the League to carry on a ' fighting ' policy." 

He recalled and reiterated a speech of his after 
the introduction of the Bill, in which he said : 

It will, I fear, come to the Irish farmers to be a choice 
to take this Bill as a settlement or to trust to the Land 
League organisation. Because I say here, speaking on 
behalf of the organisation — I may be wrong, and I shall 
be glad if I prove to be so — I believe that if this Bill 
passes into law, more especially if it passes into law 
tolerated or countenanced by the League, it will in the 
course of a few months take all the power out of the arm 
of the Land League. 

He declared with a fervour which his harshest 
critics knew to be sincere, that nobody would be 
more glad than he if those who believed the Act 
could be tested without weakening the arm of the 
League turned out to be right ; but he confessed 
he looked forward to the experiment with consider- 
able distrust. His fear was that " the yoke of land- 
lord ascendency being made lighter, the people of 
Ireland will once more bow their heads beneath it, 
and consent once again to accept the position of 
living as slaves." He recognised that the majority of 
the Executive of the League — "who are at liberty" 
— were in favour of trying the Bill, for which he 
acknowledged there was a vast deal to be said; 
but he held that the warning he had given " exoner- 
ated him from all responsibility for the future," and 



328 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

under these circumstances he held "the only 
honourable course for him was to retire from public 
life for a couple of months, and leave those who 
believed in this policy unembarrassed to carry 
it out." 

Parnell discussed with studied gentleness the 
difficulty thus created. To a few intimates who 
exhibited some of them long faces and one of 
them a sharp tongue at Morrison's Hotel, one even- 
ing after his return from the Tyrone election, he 
said in his tranquillising way : 

Dillon is in poor health. He has been too much 
away from us. He will find things will work out all 
right. Old Gladstone would think it the prettiest com- 
pliment paid to his Bill, that it will in a few months 
extinguish the Land League. The Irish farmer is not 
such a goose. You might as well think of putting out 
a fire by pouring paraffin oil on it. This Act won't settle 
the question. Of course it won't. It proposes to unsettle 
it every fifteen years, whether we like or no. But so far 
as it works, it can only help the farmers. It will bank- 
rupt one-third of the landlords, which is more than any 
No-Rent campaign of ours could do, and it will make the 
rest only too happy to be purchased out as an escape 
from the lawyers. It does not abolish Landlordism, but 
it will make Landlordism intolerable for the landlords. 
There is the Act, and you have either to lay hold of it 
or others will, and crush you. That is the only blunder 
that could damage the League. Irishmen have a bad 
habit of talking big, but they are very much obliged to 
you for not taking them at their word. If we had rejected 
this Bill, the farmers of Ireland would very properly have 
chased us out of the country. If we were not to make 
the best of it now, the only effect would be that it would 



KILMAINHAM 



329 



be used in spite of us, but that the landlords would get off 
with half the reductions we can, with judicious handling, 
knock out of these Land Commissioners. 

Although I took no note of his words at the 
time, there was no forgetting the substance of his 
unpretentious apophthegms, as, after listening long 
to more excited counsels, he worried them out 
slowly and painfully, but with a distinctness on 
which there was no going back. 

But the National Convention was about to 
assemble, and everybody except Parnell was in a 
state of some perturbation as to the result. There 
was the danger that either coercion had so far dis- 
mayed or the splendid bribe held forth in the Land 
Act so far demoralised the agrarian mind, that the 
assembly would be a poor one, and, according to the 
current English prognostications, the agitators be 
left high and dry. There was the graver danger 
that the more ardent spirits, coming up in the full 
flush of a revolutionary fever, would hear of no 
parley with the Act, and hurry the country into 
scenes of chaos and intestine conflict, in which the 
Parliamentary Party and the Kilmainham Party 
would once for all part company. The first anxiety 
was at an end when the Convention assembled. 
The most case-hardened of English Pressmen, cast- 
ing his eyes over the fifteen hundred delegates who 
thronged the famous " Round Room," was fain to 
confess the insanity of Mr. Forster's pet delusion, 
that nobody adhered to Parnell in Ireland except 



330 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

"a parcel of dissolute ruffians and village tyrants." 
The assembly represented all the physical and moral 
attributes of a young nation exulting in its strength. 
The other peril proved to be a far more real one. 
Parnell's own voice was the only one heard during 
the first day's discussions that was not for the scorn- 
ful and uncompromising rejection of the Act. To 
Henry George's disciples, intent on an unrivalled 
opportunity of realising the Nationalisation of the 
Land — to fiery young peasants, intoxicated with the 
delight of seeing the demon power of Landlordism 
reeling under their blows — it seemed little short 
of a betrayal to ask them to stop short in a 
career of victory, by which the glorious vague- 
ness of the revolutionary dreamer could see no 
difficulty in completing the abolition of Land- 
lordism and of Rent, without the aid of lawyers or 
statutes. 

Parnell's opening address was mostly listened to 
in a respectful but frigid silence. The sure and 
penetrating statesmanship with which he singled out 
the incurable error of the Act — that it proposed to 
reopen the Land question every fifteen years, and 
must consequently be a continual source of con- 
tention between landlords and tenants, "and keep 
classes in Ireland divided so that we may thus be 
prevented from utilising our united strength for 
the purpose of recovering our lost rights of legislat- 
ing for ourselves " — passed unnoticed at the time, 
signally though its wisdom has been vindicated by 



XIV KILMAINHAM 331 

subsequent events. It was only when he de- 
clared " the Land Act settled nothing," or " our 
principles demand that rent shall be abolished," that 
the " loud and prolonged cheering " came. But he 
abated not a jot of his determination to stand by 
the central recommendation of the official resolu- 
tions, viz. that, while reiterating that no settlement 
would be satisfactory which did not involve the 
complete abolition of Landlordism, the Executive 
should be authorised to ascertain the true effect of 
the Land Act upon the rental of Ireland, by present- 
ing test cases upon estates in various parts of Ireland 
in the new Land Courts. 

This issue of testing the Act or of rejecting it 
sans phrase was promptly taken up by the impatient 
disciples of the Kilmainham Party. A rugged 
Northern Land Nationaliser, Mr. Lewis Smyth, 
leaped to the front with the laconic amendment : 
" That we don't entertain the Land Act at all." 
His advice, " Do with it what the English did with 
the Irish party — take it head and neck and bundle it 
out," was cheered to the echo. There were more 
serious forces behind. Mr. Patrick Forde, " in the 
name of eight hundred Irish-American Branches, 
adjured the Convention to unfurl the banner of No- 
Rent," if they did not want to dishearten America, 
and the further 30,000 francs with which the cable- 
gram was accompanied was scarcely needed to 
attest the reality of the power he spoke for. A 
cablegram from Chicago affirmed "it would be 



332 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

nothing short of national suicide if the Irish people 

accepted the Act." 

Parnell's own sister, Miss Fanny Parnell (one 

with all the Promethean passion and the Promethean 

unhappiness of the poet), sent me for publication in 

United Ireland some verses of scorn, headed " To 

England: the Land Act of 1881," of which the first 

lines ran : 

Tear up the parchment lie ! 
Scatter its fragments to the hissing wind — 
And hear again the People's first and final cry : 
No more for you, O lords, we'll dig and grind ; 
No more for you the castle, and for us the stye ! 

Mr. Thomas Brennan sent a letter from Kil- 
mainham Jail, with the request that it should be 
read to the Convention, " conveying the opinion of 
all the prisoners here " that " if the will of the 
country was in favour of the policy indicated in the 
cablegrams from the American Branches," they need 
not let their decision be influenced by any con- 
sideration of amnesty for the prisoners. Mr. 
O'Neill Larkin, the special correspondent of the 
Irish World, went a step further, and after insisting 
that the bulk of the money contributed from the 
United States was given in virtue of a sacred 
compact, that no quarter was to be given to Land- 
lordism, gave rude expression to the increasing 
bickerings between the Kilmainham Party and the 
Parliamentary Party, by warning the Irish people 
not to let their attention be diverted from the 
fight in Ireland to "the action of Parliamentary 



XIV KILMAINHAM ^^^ 

blatherumskites in the House of Commons." It is 
true that before the Convention closed, Mr. James 
Redpath, a brave and witty American pressman, 
who had played a conspicuous part in the early 
history of the Land League in Mayo,^ resented 
hotly the right of "presumptuous individuals" to 
speak for the bulk of the Irish race in America in 
attempting to dictate a policy to the people at home, 
declaring that the man who in America should talk 
of Parnell's illustrious Party as " Parliamentary 
blatherumskites " would be thrown out of the 
window. But this was two days after the crucial 
struggle was over. On the first day there was 
apparently nobody to withstand the storm. With a 
lack of moral courage not unpardonable in a country 
where, traditionally, to be extreme was almost always 
to be extremely in the right, even speakers of grave 
and responsible character submitted to the prevailing 
contagion so far, as to denounce the resolution in 
favour of testing the Act in their speeches, in the 
secret confidence that Parnell would succeed in get- 
ting the better of the hot-heads. Twenty years later, 
when there was question of making the best use of 
an Act which supplied the means of abolishing- 
Landlordism altogether, and realising Parnell's dream 
of the union of classes, there was still enough of 
the same perverse tendency to be uncompromising 

1 He was the first to use the word " Boycott " in the sense in 
which it has since been incorporated in every language of 
Christendom. 



334 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

at the wrong moment left to ravage the fairest part 
of Ireland's harvest. The greatest oratorical success 
of the Convention was that of a young priest who, 
in language of flame, and with a threatening arm 
outstretched, declared "he would distrust and 
absolutely spurn with indignation the political 
sagacity which would ask them for a moment to 
pause upon their road and tamper with this rag of a 
Bill, or that would ever ask them, after the false 
faith of the last six months, to look again to 
England for justice." The enraptured crowd, when 
he had finished, would not be silenced until he came 
forth to make a second speech, headier still. As 
not uncommonly happens in such cases, the 
excellent young rhetorician, whom nothing would 
moderate in this hour of triumph, was not heard of 
afterwards in the years of storm, when an un- 
compromising spirit would have been of more public 
service, and would have been subjected to a sterner 
test. The Kilmainham Party had seemingly carried 
the day. Every reference to the test resolution was 
received with shouts of " No trial ! " " Yes ! " cried 
one ironical orator from Tralee, "we will give it a 
Jed wood trial — hang it first and try it afterwards." 
An observer who was only guided by the cheering 
might have inferred that Parnell stood all but alone 
in the assembly. None even of his Parliamentary 
lieutenants joined in the fray. He literally "bore 
the battle on his single shield." While the 
Convention was still afire with warlike rhetoric, and 



KILMAINHAM 335 

when he perhaps had judged the uninterrupted 
monotony of the denunciations of the Act was 
beginning to pall, Parnell quietly interposed with 
some observations of the prosiest character, but, as 
usual, shot through with a few sentences revealing a 
will of steel. He put aside with a gentle contempt 
the error of most of the speakers that he contem- 
plated accepting the Act. The resolution authorised 
the Executive to test the Act, not to close with it. 
" I myself don't believe the Act will stand the test," 
he said in his matter-of-fact way, " but we should be 
assuming an unreasonable and indefensible position 
in the eyes of the world, and I venture to think in 
our own eyes also, if we refused to test this measure. 
If, having acted reasonably and having tested it, we 
find it breaks in the test, we shall be justified by 
the public opinion of the world in whatever stand 
we take, No-Rent or otherwise, with regard to the 
Act for the future." Here was at once the good 
sense to realise what might be extracted from the 
Act and the grim resolution to resume the fight 
with redoubled strength in so far as the test might 
prove unsatisfactory. To a silent listener like 
myself, who had no more thought of making a 
public speech than of standing upon my head before 
the Convention, but all whose sympathies went out 
to those who placed more trust in Irish manhood 
than in English statutes, that scene of the strong 
man tranquilly breasting his way against the tide 
that threatened to swallow him gave me an im- 



336 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

pression which was never lost, that Parnell was at 
one and the same time as truly conservative as the 
most staid ecclesiastic in the assembly, and, to any 
necessary extent, more truly revolutionary than the 
most blatant of the young lions who roared at him 
for extreme measures. His fitness for the master- 
ship of many legions was never better proved. The 
tellers had been named for a division, but, when it 
came to a show of hands, the majority in favour of 
the test resolution was so overwhelming that the 
Kilmainham Party, in a silence which was not the 
least impressive part of the encounter, accepted 
their defeat. 

The next three weeks witnessed a series of 
scenes which exhibited Parnell at the meridian 
height of his power as a leader of men. After a 
few days' rest in his Wicklow home, testing the gold 
washings of the river that ran through his demesne, 
or pondering over his pet problems in trigonometry, 
he made a triumphant entry into Dublin, with a 
hundred thousand men all but tearing him and one 
another limb from limb in the paroxysms of their 
frantic allegiance. It was after midnight when he 
escaped from their wild embraces. By the morning 
train he was on his way to a County Convention in 
Maryborough ; the next day he addressed the 
Central Branch of the Land League ; a night after- 
wards he was at the head of the multitude who 
welcomed Father Sheehy on his release from 
Kilmainham Jail ; within the same week he was in 



XIV KILMAINHAM 337 

the midst of the most exciting scene of all, among 
his own constituents of Cork City, of all the hot 
Keltic race the hottest in their ecstasies and the most 
bewitching in their clinging tenderness. In the 
midst of all this round of intoxicating excitements, 
he applied himself steadily to the work of sifting out 
his test cases for the Land Courts. Before or after 
one of those speeches, every sentence of which was 
scanned by hundreds of thousands of hostile eyes, he 
would break away from the excited admirers who 
beset his hotel, and shut himself up with some shrewd 
attorney or cool-headed local captain, working out 
the intricate particulars of scores of suggested claims, 
with a view to lighting upon those that would be 
most likely to eventuate in a satisfactory standard of 
rent for the different classes of tenancy. Mr. Healy 
was lavishing all the resources of his indefatigable 
energy and unequalled knowledge of the Act in 
directing the corps of solicitors who were spread 
all over the country selecting appropriate cases. 
Parnell's two objects of utilising the Act but of 
utilising it under the supreme influence of the 
League, were being accomplished as by some dark 
wizardry, without gunshots or bloodshed, but with 
the relentlessness of fate. 

It would, indeed, be too much to say that he was 
not sometimes swept farther than he would have 
cared to go in the contagious heat of the revolution 
surging around him. Even the most expert riders 
of the whirlwind cannot always mark out its path. 



338 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Gladstone pounced with an eagle's claw upon the 
statement wrung from the Irish leader, by the sight 
of a hundred thousand Cork rebels in wild array- 
before him : " Those who want to preserve even the 
golden link of the Crown must see to it that that 
shall be the only link connecting the two countries." 
Another unguarded expression of his, in a banquet 
speech, obviously wide of the exact facts, that 
"there is plenty of room for a land reformer of the 
future in the task of reducing the Irish rack-rental 
of to-day from seventeen millions a year to the two 
or three millions a year which I define as a fair 
rent," was still more eagerly fastened upon. The 
rental of Ireland was never anything approaching 
seventeen millions, but the Irish annuities under 
the Land Purchase Act will not exceed the three 
millions desiderated by Parnell, even in the chaleur 
comnnmicative of a Cork banquet. 

He himself alluded with a good-humoured 
raillery to the temptation of the moment towards 
lurid language. " For my part," he said, "having 
been during several years of my political life 
considerably in advance of the rest of the country, I 
am exceedingly pleased to find, as the result of 
my excursions during the last few weeks, that the 
rest of the country is considerably in advance of 
me." But wherever the framework of his policy was 
really touched, it was found to be of adamant. In 
the midst of the torchlights and frenzy of his mid- 
night meeting in Dublin, he took care to tell his 



XIV KILMAINHAM 339 

hearers, "warned by the history of the past, we 
know that we must fight this battle within the limits 
of the Constitution. We shall not permit ourselves 
for an instant to be tempted beyond our strength." 

For a man of Gladstone's constitutional righteous- 
ness, this Irishman, tearing down Bastilles and in- 
vading Tuileries with a determined reasonableness 
which gunshots could not pierce nor warrants seize 
upon, was an enigma wholly unintelligible. For 
the first time in the collisions of the weak and 
passionate race with the strong and stolid one, it 
was the Englishman who lost his head and the 
Irishman who went on his way with a calmness too 
self-restrained to be even contemptuous. While, as 
we have just seen, it took all Parnell's strength to 
save the Act from summary rejection by followers 
of his own, who mistook his policy for pusillanimity, 
he was assailed by Gladstone, on the other hand, as 
the cold-blooded politician who was withholding 
the blessings of the Act from a people thirsting to 
receive them. In the early days of October the 
Prime Minister made a speech at Leeds, which 
made it clear that, far from appreciating and assist- 
ing Parnell's moderating influence, he had made up 
his mind, at the risk of playing the game of the 
No-Rent school, to force the Irish leader's hand by 
goading him and the Land League to fight for 
their lives. He seized with avidity some flamboy- 
ant resolutions of Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) 
M'Cabe and sixteen of the Irish Bishops, glorify- 



340 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

ing the Act, and in no doubtful terms stigmatising 
the Land League as its enemies. He omitted to 
note that they proceeded from a meeting from 
which Archbishop Croke and his friends were 
absent, and that the really remarkable feature of 
the document was not the number of Bishops who 
signed it, but the number of Bishops who did not. 
Stooping to one of the familiar devices of English 
statecraft in Ireland, Gladstone sought to sow divi- 
sion in the Irish ranks by singling out Mr. Dillon 
for encomiums at the expense of his leader. 

Suppose, gentlemen, you were like Mr. Dillon — that 
you believed Ireland entitled to complete independence, 
and suppose you found a measure passed by what some 
of them over there think an alien Parliament, granting, 
with a liberality unknown to history, the Land legislation 
which now prevails in Ireland — what would you do? 
Would you, in consequence of your ulterior views, reject 
that Act ? . . . No, you would not. You would say that 
you were not justified in intercepting the benevolent 
legislation of a measure like the Land Act, and that is 
what Mr, Dillon alone, I am sorry to say, among his 
friends, has done. He will not give up his extreme 
National views, but neither will he take upon himself the 
fearful responsibility of attempting to plunge his country 
into permanent disorder and chaos by intercepting the 
operation of the Land Act. I claim him as an opponent, 
but as an opponent whom I am glad to honour. 

The perversity with which the roles of the two 
distinguished Irishmen were transposed — for it was 
Mr. Dillon who regarded with apprehension the 
plan of testing the Act, in the belief that the result 



XIV KILMAINHAM 341 

would be in a few months to efface the power of 
the Land League — was not the worst blunder of 
the Leeds speech. A rudimentary knowledge of 
the Irish character, and especially of Mr. Dillon's 
own high and chivalrous code of honour, would 
have told the Premier that in making compliments 
to his address the foundation of an indictment of the 
National Policy just approved by the Convention, 
he was taking the best of all methods of persuading 
Mr. Dillon to sink all preferences of his own in 
order to identify himself with his bitterly reviled 
leader. The Leeds speech was no sooner read in 
Ireland than John Dillon emerged from his retire- 
ment to repel with scorn the insult, none the less 
hateful because it was probably all unconscious, of 
coupling his name with an Englishman's device for 
dividing Irishmen, His reply to the Premier's 
unlucky panegyric was that "he shrank from the 
contamination of his praise." He could only guess 
that Gladstone must have been the victim of a 
practical joke, in his travesty of his (Mr. Dillon's) 
views of the Land Act, when he complimented him 
upon being the only one who declared against 
" intercepting the benevolent legislation of the 
Land Act," considering that his attitude all along 
was a diametrically opposite one. He once more 
frankly avowed, that if he could have prevented it, 
Gladstone's Act would never have been passed ; 
that "his only trouble was that he had not suc- 
ceeded in standing between the country and the 



342 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Act so far." He finally raised the enthusiasm and 
affection of his countrymen to the highest pitch by 
declaring that "at no time since I first became a 
political follower of Mr. Parnell have I seen more 
reason to admire his generalship and his political 
skill than at the present moment." The Leeds 
speech, in fact, if it was meant to widen the breach 
between "the Kilmainham Party" and the Parlia- 
mentary Party, had the opposite effect of effacing all 
distinctions between them. If it was intended to 
diminish Parnell's power of frustrating the Act, it 
made it all but impossible, even for him, to get the 
Act spoken of in Ireland without execration. To 
the Premier's charge that the doctrines preached 
by the Convention, and since passed into law by 
statutes proceeding from both English Parties, were 
" doctrines of sheer public plunder " ; his still worse 
attempt to confound the policy of the Irish leader 
with hateful and murderous crimes — an attempt that 
was not finally given over in England until the 
suicide of Richard Pigott, with the moneys of the 
Times newspaper in his pocket ; and finally, his 
affectation to treat Parnell's policy of " test cases " 
as a fraudulent "game" — which he undertook by- 
main force to put down with the historic menace 
that "the resources of civilisation against our 
enemies are not yet exhausted" — there could be 
only one reply from Ireland. A great wave of 
indignation against the calumnies and threats of 
the Leeds speech swept the Irish nation to its 



XIV KILMAINHAM 343 

depths. Again it took the all but imperturbable 
self-restraint of the Irish chief to hold down the 
passions he was supposed in England to be letting 
loose. Two days afterwards he was in Wexford, 
in presence of scenes that would have overheated 
the brain of, perhaps, any other man of his genera- 
tion. His Wexford speeches had the touch of fire 
that thrilled the country, but were above all else 
characterised by a provoking coolness, a merciless 
strength of argument, and a suspicion of contempt 
for the thunders of his angry antagonist that gave 
him most decidedly the best of the duel with the 
mighty orator to whom he was replying. He dis- 
missed Gladstone's post - mo7dem tributes to the 
statesmanship of O'Connell and Butt, in contrast 
with their degenerate descendants, with the remark : 
"In the opinion of English statesmen, no man is 
good in Ireland until he is dead and buried, and 
unable to strike a blow for Ireland " ; adding, with a 
note of gaiety not without its sad prescience : " Per- 
haps the day may come when even I may get a 
good word from English statesmen as a moderate 
man — after I am dead and buried," He had no 
difficulty in showing that on two separate occasions 
it was the vote of the Irish Party that saved the 
Bill they were now taunted with conspiring against. 
Time has wholly vindicated his plea, that it was 
only by cautious trial, and not by unconditional 
acceptance, the Act could be made to produce even 
a tolerable alleviation of an incurable system. 



344 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

The villainous imputation of sympathy with 
crime he waved aside with a gesture too haughty 
for more than a word of cold and biting scorn. He 
quoted with terrific force Gladstone's confession 
that "the Government had no moral force behind 
them in Ireland " ; far from replying to the gasconade 
of increased coercion by any gasconade of his own, 
he said of the Leeds threats, " These are very 
brave words that he uses, but it strikes me that 
they have a ring about them like the whistle of a 
schoolboy on his way through a churchyard at 
night " ; and, looking across the waste of bitter 
coercion and reprisals now before the country, he 
wound up with the anticipation — calm, almost 
business-like, but sure as if his tongue had been 
touched with the Hebrew prophet's coal of fire — 
that Gladstone would yet eat his brave words, and 
recognise "that England's mission in Ireland has 
been a failure, and that Irishmen have established 
their right to govern Ireland by laws made by 
themselves, for themselves, upon Irish soil." 

Never surely was the whirlwind more victoriously 
ridden. For the next week he shut himself up 
with Mr. Healy and the lawyers, perfecting his 
test cases. The popular strength was already 
sufficiently solidified. Could he have chosen, he 
would have preferred to make no further speeches 
until the new Land Courts had shown their quality 
for good or ill. But even to the curb of such a 
rider the whirlwind will not always respond. The 



KILMAINHAM 345 

Conventions and mass meetings went on with ever- 
increasing fervour. One memorable night's con- 
versation at Morrison's Hotel gave me for the first 
time a startling glimpse of Parnell's own anxieties 
lest he should be driven further than he thought 
wise, and thus give Forster some pretext for his 
manifest determination to get the League, at all 
hazards, out of the way of the new Land Courts. 
Parnell had addressed a great Convention of the 
county of Kildare during the day, and was finishing 
his chop in the midst of an excited group of 
Members of Parliament, organisers, and priests in 
the fireless private room which he engaged on 
very rare occasions at Morrison's. He spoke 
scarcely at all, but with his head graciously bent 
forward, his ears attentive, and his eyes modestly 
fixed on the fireplace, as was his wont, listened 
with an air of respectful deference to the words of 
wisdom poured in upon him. It was this habit of 
patient and long-suffering attention, even to the 
loquacity of bores, which led shallow people to im- 
pute to him weakness, and a readiness to take the 
first suggestion offered to him in an hour of emer- 
gency. I know at least two persons who are 
convinced that it was the ideas they broached to 
him in the train going down which Mr. Parnell 
appropriated almost literatifn in his speech at 
Wexford. It was only when the noisier portion of 
the company had filtered out, and only two or three 
intimates were left, that Parnell began to speak. 



346 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

To my amazement (for I was quite as hot as the 
hottest in the transports of the revolutionary fever 
of the hour) he spoke with considerable alarm, and 
even with some vexation, of the lengths to which 
some people were pushing him. 

He announced that he would attend no more 
public meetings for the present, and that he 
would not go to jail. He unquestionably had a 
peculiar shrinking from solitary confinement. 
Certain hereditary traditions of his family history 
would largely account for the gloom with which 
any allusion to the subject always filled him. But 
no friend whose opinion was worth having could 
ever have suspected him of allowing his political 
calculations to be regulated by any apprehension of 
his own. He was one of the slowest of mankind 
to go into a position of danger, but, once in it, 
Leonidas was not more unshakable at his post. 
" This old gentleman is in a temper," he said ; " he 
will let Buckshot ^ do as he likes, and if you want to 
know what coercion can be, just try a Quaker. No, 

1 His own nickname for Mr. W. E. Forster, who first substituted 
buckshot for ball cartridges as the ammunition of the Irish con- 
stabulary. The excellent philanthropist, with the very best motives, 
caused the constabulary to discharge their firearms with more 
freedom, because the effect was supposed to be less deadly, whereas 
the real effect was to wound half-a-dozen women or children with a 
shower of buckshot, where only one would have been hit by a bullet. 
This nickname so stuck that it was not only the Chief Secretary's 
name among the Castle officials, but was freely adopted by himself. 
On his death-bed — one of the most mournful passages of the eternal 
Irish tragedy — he sent word to a young Irish lady who had once 
been very friendly, "Tell her if she saw old Buckshot now, she 
would forgive him." 



XIV KILMAINHAM 347 

they will suppress the League, and snap us all up, 
and where will your No- Rent gentlemen be then ? " 
A member of the Executive, who, a few days after- 
wards, when the proclamation suppressing the Land 
League appeared, departed for his country home 
and was not further heard of in the movement, 
made some remark to show his contempt for 
Coercion. 

" Mr. ," said Parnell, with very unusual 

severity, " I daresay you were born to be crucified. 
I was not. I am for winning something for the 
country all the time. It is the best way of winning 
more. It is always the way in Ireland," he said, 
speaking slowly as if in reverie that nobody cared 
to interrupt. " See how they pushed O'Connell to 
talk such rubbish in his Mallow Defiance. It was 
sillier than anything of our own," he said, with a 
gleam of malicious humour. Then very gravely, "It 
was the end of him. And how quietly those young 
warrior gentlemen took it for five years, while the 
poor old man was dying off. I daresay O'Connell 
was a bit off his head when he made his Mallow 
Defiance." Whereupon we fell a-debating the old 
controversy. Young Ireland v. Old Ireland, Parnell 
holding largely with O'Connell, who had diffi- 
culties of which the self-confident " young men " 
knew not, but appraising higher than any of the 
Young Irelanders Fintan Lalor, who alone had a 
workable plan. If there had been railways then to 
enable him to travel over the country, and any means 



348 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

of getting him the ear of the people, Lalor might 
have anticipated the Land League by thirty years, 
and produced a very respectable rebellion which 
could not well have been worse for the country than 
the Famine. 

We parted late, with an understanding that he 
was to leave the country in a few days for, I think, 
a continental holiday, after giving the final touch to 
the preparations for lodging the test cases. The 
hall porter was snoring heavily on his bench when 
we awakened him to let us out. The Post Office 
clock struck two, when three of us broke off our 
final excited colloquy at the corner of O'Connell 
Bridge. At six o'clock the porter at Morrison's 
was called up to receive a visit from Mr. Mallon, 
the Chief of the Dublin Detective Division, with a 
warrant for the arrest of Parnell as one " reason- 
ably suspected of treasonable practices." The 
porter managed to keep the detectives in the hall 
while he communicated the ill news to Parnell 
in his bedroom. He told him every servant in 
the house would die for him, and pointed out a 
passage among the chimney-pots over which he 
could easily reach the attic window of a neighbour- 
ing friendly house. " Thanks, no — I don't think 
so," was the reply, after what seemed a moment of 
deliberation. " Kindly bid them wait below," he 
added, issuing his order to the detectives with a 
hauteur of which his own servants never knew a 
trace. He was prodigiously angry. Chief Mallon, 



XIV KILMAINHAM 349 

like most Irish officials not wholly corrupted, had a 
good deal of the original Nationalist mingled with 
the instincts of the detective officer. He veiled his 
eyes deferentially before a Chief mightier than he. 
Parnell told us that one of the detectives, a great 
red-bearded fellow, in the hall, staggered and looked 
faint. His first thought was that he had been 
drinking, but he soon saw it was emotion quite un- 
mixed. It was one of the not more than half-a- 
dozen occasions in his life when Parnell showed 
either temper or haughtiness. The detectives dared 
not speak, or scarcely look, while on the way to 
Kilmainham Jail. I am certain they would have 
turned the horse's head about and driven where 
he ordered them, had he chosen to intimate 
a wish. His observation to some friend on the 
way to the prison, "Tell the Irish people I will 
consider they have not done their duty if I am 
soon released," might have told anybody less in- 
fatuated than Forster what was coming. But it 
was only after reaching Kilmainham, when the 
prison officers proposed to go through the usual 
form of searching him, that the pent-up fire burst 
forth. " How dare you ? " he cried, starting back, 
his arms drawn up convulsively, every muscle in 
his body hardening to steel. The unfortunate 
official was ready to sink under the flags. We 
afterwards asked Parnell what he should have done 
if the head warder had persisted. " I should have 
killed him ! " he said in a nervous whisper, between 



350 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

his teeth. Then, after a moment, with one of his 
pleasant smiles, " Poor old Searle, how he would 
have been surprised ! " 

The Greek Chorus would have had here as 
sombre a theme as ^schylus could have devised for 
them as to the everlasting tragedy of things. Here 
were two men, of colossal power, and as to the 
fundamental realities of the Irish situation really at 
one, who were nevertheless set hopelessly at cross 
purposes. Gladstone, who hated Coercion, gave 
Forster carte blanche in his moment of maddest con- 
viction that Force was the only remedy. In his 
passion for securing a fair trial for his Land Act, 
he put an end to all chance of a fair trial. Parnell, 
who desired nothing better than to test the Act in 
a manner which, everybody now knows, would have 
doubled the fair fruits of the Act, and made the 
inevitable transition to the Abolition of Land- 
lordism a swift and crimeless one, was turned 
from the Land Courts into the prison, where 
there was only one weapon left to him. He 
and his chief lieutenants were collected together 
into a new and vaster Kilmainham Party, where 
it ought to have been the first care of statesman- 
ship to discredit the old one. Fierce a stab as 
the arrest of Parnell aimed at the heart of Ire- 
land, the terms of almost insolent triumph in 
which the Premier announced it in the London 
Guildhall did still more to raise Irish feeling to 
white heat : — 



XIV KILMAINHAM 351 

The Government recognises that it is charged in Ire- 
land with the most arduous and solemn duties, and those 
duties to the best of its ability it is determined to perform. 
It is no unnatural criticism on those words which ex- 
pressed the hope that they would not be words alone. 
Our decision, my Lord Mayor, our determination has 
been that to the best of our power they should be 
carried into acts ; and towards the vindication of law, 
of order, and the rights of property, of the freedom of 
the land, of the first elements of political life and civilisa- 
tion, the first step has been taken in the arrest of the man 
(loud and prolonged cheering and waving of hats and 
handkerchiefs) — in the arrest of the man who, unhappily, 
from motives which I do not challenge, which I cannot 
examine, and with which I have nothing to do, has made 
himself beyond all others prominent in the attempt to 
destroy the authority of the law and to substitute what 
would be nothing more nor less than anarchical oppression 
exercised upon the people of Ireland (cheers). 

It was as if the Germans had not contented 
themselves with entering Paris, without scattering 
the bones of Napoleon in the Invalides. The initial 
blunder of Gladstone and Forster was their belief 
that Parnellism was a tyranny, for ridding them of 
which the Irish people would be secretly thankful. 
The next six months were, on the contrary, to bear 
tragic witness that the Government had let loose 
the most terrific storm of National protest ever 
raised by a disarmed people — a storm which they 
could only finally appease by suing for peace to their 
own prisoner. From every corner of the island there 
rose up a cry of anguish and of wrath. In Cork 
City the shops were instantly shut up in mourning. 



352 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

The Tipperary Land League raised the shout which 
was soon in every throat, that the test cases must 
be abandoned, and no rent be paid until Parnell's 
release. Even a man so little inclined to head- 
strong passion as Mr. J. E. Redmond declared in 
Wexford : " Yesterday we were willing to test the 
Act, to-day it is our duty to trample upon it. 
Until Parnell is released, I say it is the duty of the 
people to strike against all rent ! " At a special 
meeting of the Executive of the Land League, a 
firm resolution was shown to go on steadily upon 
the lines prescribed by Parnell and approved by the 
National Convention. But the continuation of the 
policy of testing the Act was just what Forster had 
resolved, at any cost of civil war, to prevent. The 
next morning Mr. Sexton,^ who was in principal 
charge of the Head Offices ; Mr. J. P. Quinn, the 
Assistant Secretary; and Mr. W. Doris, the Second 
Assistant Secretary, were all carried off to prison, thus 
completely dismembering the staff charged with the 
preparation of the test cases. A still more ominous 
sign was the aggressive display of immense forces of 
police around the neighbourhood of the public meet- 
ing of protest held the same night in the Rotunda. 
Forster's armed forces marched and countermarched 
and challenged with the unmistakable air of men 
spoiling for a fight. The " whiff of grape-shot " 
policy was manifestly the consigne from the Castle. 

1 Mr. Sexton was ill in bed when arrested, and was released after 
a few days. 



XIV KILMAINHAM 353 

Parnell had managed to send from Kilmainham 
a letter to be read to the Rotunda meeting, in which 
he gave the Government a plain warning that, if 
the League should be suppressed, and the tenants' 
constitutional right to approach the Land Courts 
unfettered thus abolished, they would find them- 
selves face to face with a general refusal of rents. 
The member of the Executive to whom the letter 
was addressed (Mr. Dillon) considered it wiser not to 
make it public at the meeting, until the Executive 
should have had an opportunity of deliberating over 
so grave an announcement. Accordingly, after the 
Rotunda meeting was over, and while the streets 
outside were still throbbing with the march of 
excited crowds, and the provocations of still more 
excited police battalions, a private meeting of such 
of the chief men of the movement as could be 
gathered together was held in a sitting-room of the 
Imperial Hotel. Mr. Dillon was there, and Mr. 
T. D. Sullivan, and Mr. Biggar and Mr. James 
O'Kelly, Dr. J. E. Kenny, and Mr. P. J. Sheridan 
of Tubbercurry, with one or two others besides 
myself. Nobody could any longer doubt that it was 
the determination of the Government to break up 
wholly the machinery for presenting the test cases, 
and do the League to death. The conditions pre- 
conised in Parnell's letter being thus present, the 
debate arose whether the time was not come for 
striking back, while there were still any members 
of the Executive at large to make a No-Rent move- 



2 A 



354 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

ment an effective one. Mr. Dillon did not express 
any decided opinion, beyond what he had just told 
the meeting in the Rotunda — that he would be 
greatly disappointed if the arrest of Parnell facili- 
tated the collection of rent in Ireland ; that the 
refusal of rent was so grave a step that the Execu- 
tive, so long as there was any possibility left of 
working out the policy of the Convention, had not 
considered it their duty to recommend it, but that 
if any Irish county took it upon itself to lead the 
van, in avenging their leader by refusing to pay rent 
until he was released, that was a course they were 
at perfect liberty to adopt, if, on mature delibera- 
tion, they were determined to adhere to it. In 
other words, he seemed to shrink from taking the 
responsibility for a No- Rent movement upon the 
Executive, while encouraging the people of par- 
ticular districts to assume the responsibility them- 
selves. Dr. Kenny and myself, and I think one 
or two others, pressed strongly that if action were 
to be taken at all, it must be taken now, and with 
the whole strength of the organisation, while its 
power was still unbroken. Mr. T. D. Sullivan was 
opposed to a No- Rent movement tooth and nail. 
" It is against the law of God," he declared with 
great earnestness. '* The Bishops and priests will 
be against you. You will never get the Irish people 
to go against their priests. It is all wrong, it is 
immoral, and I'll have nothing to do with it." Mr. 
Biggar was next asked for his opinion. He had 



XIV KILMAINHAM 355 

been slumbering balmily during great part of Mr. 
Sullivan's speech, but was vaguely awake to the 
peroration. "Well, you see, mister," he observed, 
" the morality of the thing is right enough. The 
point is, will you get the fellows to do it ? " There 
was a roar of laughter at this characteristically 
canny view of the situation. True to his character 
of "the Fenian Whig" — the rough man of war 
doubled with the astute politician — Mr. O' Kelly, 
whose soldierly allegiance to the flag was worthy of 
the days of chivalry, was nevertheless so deeply 
conscious of the blessings with which the Land Act, 
however ill administered, was pregnant for the Irish 
tenants, that he inveighed against a No-Rent policy 
as hotly as Mr. Sullivan, though for different 
reasons. " A prisoner of war has no business dic- 
tating the campaign," he declared, with an oath 
smelling of the powder of the Foreign Legion. 
" Make damned fools of yourselves as much as you 
like. I will be on my way to Italy in the morning." 
He was, as a matter of fact, on his way to Kilmain- 
ham Jail in the morning, and received with an old 
campaigner's philosophy the mocking congratula- 
tions of his companions in captivity on Forster's 
grateful appreciation of his moderation. " I forgot 
old Buckshot is a more damned fool still," was the 
only apology he would offer. 

The midnight council separated without com- 
ing to any decision. As we separated, the street 
outside was a scene of mad excitement, the police 



356 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

charging through the crowds with a fury that 
nothing except the fear of an armed insurrection 
could explain. At ten o'clock the next morning, 
as I was turning into the Freeman office to inquire 
as to the rumoured arrest of Mr. O' Kelly, I was 
arrested myself on a warrant alleging me to be 
"reasonably suspected of treasonable practices." 
Almost every remaining man connected with the 
direction of the movement was struck at during the 
day. Mr. Biggar escaped from the net by depart- 
ing for England by the early morning mail-boat. 
Mr. Arthur O'Connor, who was to have succeeded 
Mr. Sexton in charge of the Central Offices, was 
actually visiting Parnell in Kilmainham Jail while 
the detectives were searching the Imperial Hotel 
for him. When the detectives followed the scent 
to Kilmainham, their prey was gone. Mr. Healy, 
who was returning from England, was stopped by 
a special messenger and despatched on the more 
useful business of a mission to the United States 
in concert with Mr. T. P. O'Connor. By Parnell's 
prudent foresight, the Treasurer of the League, 
Mr. Egan, and his treasures, were safely lodged in 
Paris, or the movement might have been bank- 
rupted and robbed of its war chest at a stroke. 
Mr. Dillon, whom Gladstone had only a week pre- 
viously beslobbered with his praises, was re-arrested 
in the afternoon — nominally on a warrant charging 
him with inciting to the non-payment of rent, but 
really, as it was concluded in every cabin in Ire- 



XIV KILMAINHAM 357 

land, because he had foiled English statecraft in its 
manoeuvres to set Parnell and himself at daggers 
drawn in this hour of trial. All through the day 
squadrons of dragoons were kept prancing about 
the streets of Dublin ; infantry were massed on the 
quays ; military bugles were kept sounding — either 
in a nervous panic or in the determination to strike 
terror once for all to the nation's heart, and have 
done with it. Mr. Forster took every measure to 
exasperate the public anger, which a wiser strategy 
would have taught him to mollify. When night 
came, great masses of policemen were unloosed 
recklessly and with an extraordinary ferocity in 
the crowded streets ; the defenceless people were 
treated with such barbarity that a deputation of the 
Corporation waited upon the Chief Secretary to 
implore him to hold his hand, and were answered 
with the somewhat brutal apophthegm : " Clearing 
the streets is no milk-and-water matter." From 
that night a city which had not been for many years 
stained with a crime of blood became the easy prey 
of the secret societies, and was soon the seat of 
the most desperate conspiracy that ever shook the 
nerves of English officials in Ireland. 

My own first sensation after arrest was that of 
a blissful calm, as of one who had passed by a 
sudden death into a reijion of eternal rest. It was 
ever my way, once alight, to burn on to the socket. 
Since the first publication of United Ireland, there 
was no hour of the day, and not more than four of 



358 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the night, when I was free from a toil which had 
all the exhausting force of a fever. Practically 
every number of the paper up to the date of my 
arrest was written by myself from start to finish ; 
not merely the leading articles and the page of 
paragraph comments, but columns upon columns 
every week of letters upon all sorts of topics that 
could set young men thinking ; the editorial answers 
to the innumerable correspondents who began to 
flock in as to a national confessional for guidance ; 
the materials for the Cartoon ; even the sorry verse 
with which I had to stammer forth the wild passion 
of the hour until more ^olian spirits were tempted 
to catch up the strain. The only exception was a 
Parliamentary letter, " Among the Saxons," in which 
Mr. Healy gave a foretaste of that grim wit and 
keen intellectual surgery which were to be, in after 
years, among the prime recommendations of the 
paper. But the furnishing of the editorial pages 
was the lightest, because the most congenial, part 
of the burden. The commercial character of the 
establishment had to be raised not only from death, 
but from the deep damnation in which the Pigott 
regime had sunk it ; and the miracle fell wholly to 
myself, to whom figures, accounts, and finance were 
as abhorrent as the demons who disputed Dante's 
passage to the city of Dis. I every morning 
opened, read, and classified every letter that came 
to the office from agents, advertisers, poets, and 
politicians, and they were at least a hundred a day ; 



XIV KILMAINHAM 359 

checked the receipts of money-orders and cheques ; 
transacted the bank business ; paid the staff; and 
spent the days when the rush of pubHcation was 
over poring over the agents' accounts, stimulating 
districts where the sales were small, hunting up 
new agents and advertisers, and striving (not with- 
out an astonishing degree of success) to make ends 
meet with no working capital beyond a limited 
overdraft at the Hibernian Bank. Add to all this 
a state of health which for many years made it a 
puzzle to the doctors how I could live — a nervous 
system with as subtle a gift of torture as the pulleys 
of a mediaeval rack, a cough for ever knocking at 
my heart, and a head overloaded with the weight 
of a mountain — and it will not be difficult to under- 
stand the sense of celestial freedom from respon- 
sibility with which I, so to say, descended into 
my grave in Kilmainham under the charge of my 
detective grave-diggers. 

It was, after all, death on the battlefield, with my 
face to the foe. The paper had fought on, from 
week to week, as from barricade to barricade, with 
a wholly exhilarating vigour. To be a piece of 
literature, indeed, it had no pretension. Whatever 
dreams once haunted me of doing my life's work for 
Ireland in bookish cloisters and in the beechen 
shade rather than upon the noisy market-place were 
gone. The duty of the hour quite manifestly was to 
give up everything — literary possibilities, as well as 
health, liberty, home, and fortune — to the one aim of 



36o WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

being found wherever the blows were thickest, in a 
supreme National struggle to end the feudal system 
I had seen at its work of diabolical oppression, 
breeding famine and crimes, and afterwards in a 
dimmer background to see a regenerated Irish 
nation emerging radiantly from the darkest of all 
history's dungeons. I can the more freely say 
that, for many a year to come, my every thought 
was given to Ireland, because there was little 
virtue in renouncing personal tastes or possessions 
which had become encumbrances for one whose 
last domestic tie with life was on the point of being 
broken. 

It mattered little that literary grace had to be 
sacrificed to the exigencies of fighting journalism, to 
the temptation to that picture-writing which is bestun 
derstanded of the multitude, to the tendency towards 
an excess of emphasis which has ever since been, 
perhaps, the predominant defect of my writings and 
speeches, and which is all but inevitable in a country 
where strong language is the only weapon available. 
The writings of United Ireland purported only to be 
to literature what a bugle-charge in the midst of the 
battle is to music. The bugle-charge, at least, was 
heard in every corner of the island, and set the 
heart's blood of the young and brave a-tingling in 
an entirely satisfactory manner. 

My arrest caused me only one real pang. My 
mother was already so broken that this new blow 
made one shudder to think of the consequences. 



XIV KILMAINHAM 361 

My poor company was the last ray of light the world 
contained for her. The way to Kilmainham passed 
our lodgings, and I begged of my escort to let me 
stop to break the news to her. Their orders were 
imperative. There was a ridiculous panic at the 
Casde as to the danger of a crowd collecting. They 
were to drive to the prison by a different route. 
This act of inhumanity, as will be seen, was soon 
repaired, and the poor wretches of detectives looked 
so cast down at a piece of brutality which was none 
of their choice, that when we arrived at the prison 
gate I could not resist the temptation to pay the 
cabman, as being the only civility it was in my power 
to offer them. 

I was mercilessly chaffed by my brother-prisoners 
on my unique feat of tipping my captors for driving 
me to prison ; but I have always had a sneaking 
compassion for the native underlings in England's 
service — those poor shamefaced "good Master 
Huberts," whose poverty, and not their natural 
blood, consents to do the Castle's torturing work in 
Dublin, as in the Northampton of King John. In 
the course of a life which has brought me into fiercer 
collision than, perhaps, any other Irishman of this 
generation, with the principals, Liberal as well as 
Tory, in the Government of Ireland, it has never 
once happened to me, in wild scenes of conflict, in 
police charges and physical encounters, in court- 
houses, on the platforms of proclaimed meetings, or 
in the depths of prisons, to fall into any bitter 



362 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xiv 

personal quarrel with any policeman, subordinate 
official, or prison warder of them all. 

Parnell's first greeting to me, as I entered the 
prison yard, was characteristic, and dispelled my 
dreams of a haven of rest. 

" O'Brien, of all the men in the world, you are 
the man we wanted," he said ; and with the chuckle 
with which he always passed off a quotation, as if it 
were a successful joke : ''Deus nobis kaec otia fecit ! " 

And he begged of me during the dinner-hour to 
draft a No- Rent Manifesto. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 
Oct. i8th, i88i — May 2nd, 1882 

After Forster's colossal blunder in producing the 
No- Rent Movement by arresting Parnell, it was a 
minor, although not unamusing commentary on his 
wisdom, that he should have committed me to jail 
for the purpose of composing the No-Rent Mani- 
festo, and collected the scattered Executive of the 
Land League there for the purpose of deliberating 
thereupon. I was furnished with the stump of a 
pencil and the back of a pink telegram with which 
to perform my task, during the dinner-hour, when 
the warders are set free for more appetising work 
than espionage and leave the locked cells as peace- 
ful as a range of tombs. 

An incident which occurred before the dinner- 
bell sounded all but incapacitated me for my task 
for that day. My mother had struggled up to the 
prison to visit me. I think the fact that we could 
only see one another from behind two gratings, 
with a warder standing in the space between, had a 

363 



364 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

good deal to do with impressing her unduly with 
the terrors of my imprisonment, in which her own 
illness and immeasurable loneliness were wholly 
forgotten. It seemed to me as if the gratings 
represented a space of years of separation between 
us. I realised with a shock, as I did not in the 
least realise when we met a few hours before, the 
ravages of the fatal malady : the sweet and noble 
face fallen away to a mere framework of transparent 
ivory ; the eyes, brave and steady, but of an inex- 
pressible sadness, straining pathetically out of the 
gloom made by her mourning dress, broken only by 
the bands of silver hair. There was not a com- 
plaining word ; it would have been an infinite 
relief if there had been anything merely common- 
place to break the perfectly heart-breaking muteness 
of her grief. Under the influence of some nervous 
recklessness, I did my best to laugh away her fears 
with some boisterous pleasantries, near enough to 
tears. When she was gone, I cursed a flippancy 
which might well have jarred upon a sacred grief, 
and, I am not ashamed to avow, burst out crying as 
soon as the lock was turned in my cell door — the 
first time for fifteen years I had been able to taste of 
the luxury, and the last time up to the hour I write. 
It was in this mood I sat down to write a docu- 
ment on which so much was to depend. Once 
goaded into my task, however, I wrote on, as was 
my wont, with my head in the tropics and my feet 
in a polar-circle ; and by the time the warder made 



XV THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 365 

his round for the dinner tins, I had covered the 
back of the telegram and whatever space remained 
vacant on the front of it with the text of the 
Declaration of War which was to decide Forster's 
fate as a statesman, and much else besides. Dr. 
Joe Kenny, whom, after St. Paul's faithful com- 
panion, we used to call "the beloved physician," 
and whom his friend Adams, in one of his sallies as 
a "chartered libertine," used to stigmatise as "that 
mad Fenian apothecary," was the assiduous and 
(needless to say to any one who knew him) unfee'd 
medical attendant of the Kilmainham prisoners, until 
he became one of the Kilmainham prisoners him- 
self, and, indeed, afterwards. He had effected an 
arrangement with the prison authorities by which 
six or eight of us were concentrated in the hospital 
wing of the prison. After a time we were allowed 
to move about freely, and even to mess together in 
the room which, so long as a stone stands upon a 
stone of Kilmainham, will be known as " Mr. 
Parnell's room." Here Messrs. Parnell, O'Kelly, 
Dillon, Brennan, Kenny, Kettle, and myself met in 
the afternoon to debate the No- Rent Manifesto. 
Quite after his character of a man of action, 
Parnell, who had resisted firmly the resort to 
extreme measures so long as an experimental test 
of the Act was still possible, was now the most 
resolute for their adoption. No less character- 
istically, some, who in their revolutionary zeal 
would have killed off Gladstone's Land Act from 



366 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chaf. 

its birth, now hesitated at the call for an immediate 
decision. It is highly probable that there was a 
note of personal resentment at his arrest in Parnell's 
determination to retaliate with a No-Rent Move- 
ment, as there was no less probably on Gladstone's 
part when he directed the arrest of the strategist 
he had failed to answer otherwise. 

His imprisonment had hurt Parnell's pride to a 
degree that made reprisals sweet to him. But his 
ruling motive in passing the word for the No-Rent 
War assuredly was that the removal of every man 
who could give effect to his own policy left him no 
alternative except to accept the ignominious ex- 
tinction of the Land League without striking a 
blow, and thus leave the country unconditionally at 
the mercy of a confessedly defective Act in the 
hands of weak or hostile administrators. Also, he 
seemed considerably impressed by an argument 
which I did not fail to present to him, that the 
country had been so long taught to regard a No- 
Rent movement as practicable and irresistible, that, 
if it were not tested now under every possible 
circumstance of justification and of high and in- 
dignant National spirit to sustain it, the conclusion 
would be that a matchless opportunity had been 
lost ; and woe to the Irish leader with whom the 
white feather is discovered, or even suspected ! 
Parnell was not in the least afraid to be thought 
afraid, but he understood the practical bearing of 
the argument. He did not believe that the advice 



XV THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 367 

to the Irish tenants to endure evictions rather than 
pay their rents would be generally obeyed.^ But he 
anticipated that it would be obeyed on a sufficient 
scale to exercise upon the new Land Courts the 
same wholesome influence as the test cases, and to 
make the government of the country by Forster's 
ruthless coercive methods impossible. Events so 
abundantly justified his calculation that he, over 
whose committal to Kilmainham Prison the worthy 
common councilmen of the London Guildhall 
shouted as over a fallen and beaten man, quitted 
Kilmainham as a conqueror over the body of his 
fallen and beaten jailer. 

The No-Rent Manifesto was unquestionably, in 
spirit and in language, the product of a country in full 
revolution. Its doctrines, however, were rather more 
constitutional than the measures of the Government 
it was aimed against. It did not preach the repudia- 

1 In after years, when Lord Ashbourne's first Purchase Act was 
under discussion, Parnell startled the House of Commons with one 
of his bursts of candour, which would be put down to cynicism if 
they were not still more suggestive of fearless truth-telling. The 
House was agitated by the contention that, if England advanced the 
Irish peasants money for the purchase of their holdings, they would 
take the first opportunity of repudiating their annuities after the 
manner of the No- Rent Manifesto. "The House need have no 
alarm about that," said Parnell in his tranquil way. " I gave the 
Irish farmers the greatest opportunity they ever had, or will ever 
have, of refusing to pay their rents. They never will have such a 
chance again. They did not obey me then, and they will never obey 
me or anybody else on that point." The House seemed puzzled 
whether to be shocked or reassured ; but Parnell's plain speaking 
conquered. All hesitation as to the safety of State advances in 
Ireland was at an end ; and Parliament has now, without uneasi- 
ness, provided funds to buy out the whole soil of Ireland. 



368 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

tion of rent, but only the withholding of it until the 
people and their leaders were again placed in a posi- 
tion to exercise their constitutional right of free 
speech and free combination. It was, in fact, the 
rough old Saxon resource of refusing supplies pend- 
ing the redress of grievances ; with the difference 
that the supplies were to be withheld not from the 
Crown, but from the class in whose interest the com- 
bination of the Land League had been strangled. 

" The crisis with which we are face to face," the 
Manifesto declares, " is not of our making. It has been 
deliberately forced upon the country, while the Land Act 
is as yet untested, in order to strike down the only power 
which could have extorted any solid benefits for the 
farmers of Ireland from that Act, and to leave them once 
more helplessly at the mercy of a law invented to save 
Landlordism and administered by landlord minions." 

It was recalled that the Executive of the League 
was steadily advancing in the preparations to test 
how far the Act could be trusted to secure to the 
tenants the value of their own improvements, and 
reduce the Irish rental to a figure that would place 
the country beyond the peril of periodical famine ; 
or if the Act failed under the test, to preserve to 
the people the power of their own organisation. It 
was this attitude of strict legality and provoking 
self-command that moved a disappointed English 
Minister to plunge into an open reign of terror, in 
order to destroy by foul means an organisation 
which was confessedly too strong for him, so long 



XV THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 369 

as he retained a shadow of respect for England's 
own Constitution. 



In the face of provocations which might have turned 
men's blood to flame, the Executive of the Land League 
adhered calmly to the course traced out for them by the 
National Convention. Test cases of a varied and search- 
ing character were, with great labour, put in train for 
adjudication in the Land Courts. Even the arrest of our 
President, Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, and the excited 
state of popular feeling which it evoked, did not induce 
the Executive to swerve in the slightest from that course ; 
for Mr. Parnell's arrest might have been accounted for 
by motives of personal malice, and his removal did not 
altogether derange the machinery for the preparation of 
the test cases, which he had been at much pains to 
perfect. But the events which have since occurred — the 
seizure, or attempted seizure, of almost all the members 
of the Executive and of the chief officials of the League 
upon wild and preposterous pretences, and the vilest 
suppression of free speech — place it beyond any possi- 
bility of doubt that the English Government, unable 
constitutionally to declare the Land League an illegal 
association, defeated in the attempt to break its unity, and 
afraid to abide the result of test cases watched over by a 
powerful popular organisation, has deliberately resolved 
to destroy the whole machinery of the Central League, 
with a view to rendering an experimental trial of the Act 
impossible, and forcing it upon the Irish tenant farmers 
on the Government's own terms. . . . One constitutional 
weapon alone now remains in the hands of the Irish 
National Land League. It is the strongest, the swiftest, 
the most irresistible of all. We hesitated to advise our 
fellow-countrymen to employ it, until the savage lawless- 
ness of the English Government provoked a crisis in which 
we must either consent to see the Irish tenant farmers 
disarmed of their organisation and laid once more prostrate 

2 B 



370 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

at the feet of the landlords, and every murmur of Irish 
public opinion suppressed with an armed hand, or appeal 
to our countrymen to resort at once to the only means 
now left in their hands of bringing this false and brutal 
Government to its senses. Fellow-countrymen, the hour 
to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived. 
The Executive of the National Land League, forced to 
abandon the policy of testing the Land Act, feels bound to 
advise the tenant farmers of Ireland from this forth to pay 
No Rent, under any circumstances, to the landlords, until 
the Government relinquishes the existing system of terror- 
ism, and restores the constitutional rights of the people. 

The sword once drawn, the scabbard was thrown 
away. All the dangers to be affronted — intensified 
coercion, wholesale eviction, martial law — were un- 
flinchingly taken into consideration. 

Do not be daunted by the removal of your leaders. 
Your fathers abolished tithes by the same metho'ds, with- 
out any leaders at all. Do not suffer yourselves to be 
intimidated by threats of military violence. Against the 
passive resistance of an entire population military power 
has no weapons. Do not be wheedled into compromise 
of any sort by the dread of eviction. They can no more 
evict a whole nation than they can imprison them. . . . 
Stand passively, firmly, fearlessly by while the armies of 
England may be engaged in their hopeless struggle against 
a spirit which their weapons cannot touch. 

One of the great London papers the next morning 
declared it to be " the most audacious document ever 
penned." The passage which, above all others, 
moved English indignation was the doctrine that 
"It is as lawful to refuse to pay rents as it is to 
receive them " ; and no doubt it was the unexplained 



XV THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 371 

daring of this claim which was the weak spot of the 
Manifesto, and seemed to make its ethical condem- 
nation inevitable. But the error was really one of 
technicalities rather than of morals. The Irish 
tenants were in law obliged to give six months' 
notice before getting rid of their liability to pay 
rent. This preliminary notice once given, the 
doctrine which, thus crudely stated, presented itself 
to the uninformed English mind as unabashed dis- 
honesty, would have fulfilled every condition of 
legality, as well as morality, in the case of tenants 
who might be ready to incur the penalty of eviction 
from the lands thus thrown on the landlords' hands. 
In Ireland the Manifesto was received with the 
ominous silence which precedes great natural con- 
vulsions. It was officially read at the next (and 
last) meeting of the Central League. The meeting 
then adjourned without debate, with the knowledge 
that qua Land League they were never to re- 
assemble. That night's Dublin Gazette proclaimed 
and suppressed the Land League as an unlawful 
and criminal association. A more serious blow than 
any from the Castle was the immediate and emphatic 
condemnation of the No-Rent Movement by Arch- 
bishop Croke. We had none of us anticipated that 
the Bishops would be able to identify themselves with 
doctrines of questionable theology and of undeniable 
revolutionary violence. No people on earth more 
cheerfully than the Irish people accept ecclesiastical 
reproof in public affairs, when they feel that the 



372 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

counsels of perfection come from a loving Irish heart, 
and none have a prettier way of keeping respectfully 
never-minding them. Nevertheless, that the blow 
should come from the man of all others who had 
stood up against the inborn conservatism of his order, 
and should be delivered with an impulsive haste at 
a moment when the National leaders were contend- 
ing against all the despotic force of a great Empire, 
and when the very heavens seemed to be breaking 
up and falling on their heads, was, to the most 
ardent of Dr. Croke's worshippers, a somewhat 
staggering experience. But everybody recognised 
— and nobody with more readiness than Parnell — 
that Dr. Croke evinced a high moral courage in 
breasting the storm of unpopularity that was sure to 
follow, in order to proclaim his own perhaps ex- 
aggerated apprehensions for his people, and for the 
movement. When the English newspapers, with 
their customary adroitness, did him the wrong of 
misinterpreting his friendly warning, and announced 
that his letter was the signal for a campaign for the 
destruction of Parnell's power, the Archbishop replied 
with his own breezy roughness to the insulting sug- 
gestion that " it never entered my head to represent 
myself as a past or possible leader. I follow when 
I can, and, when I cannot, I dissent and disappear." 
In a state of the highest elation at this unexpected 
aid to his arms, the Chief Secretary proceeded to 
strike quick and hard. On the following Sunday, 
Resident Magistrates and police officers, backed by 



XV THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 2,7Z 

troops of cavalry and companies of foot-soldiers, in 
all the principal centres, burst into the meeting- 
places of the fifteen hundred Branches of the League, 
broke up the meetings, seized the books, bullied the 
unarmed people, and unceremoniously arrested all 
who said them nay. In only two instances did they 
succeed in goading the people into any semblance 
of resistance. In one of these cases a man was run 
through the heart in a bayonet charge in Ballyragget, 
and in the other case a volley of thirty-four rounds 
of buckshot was fired into a crowd in the hunger- 
stricken district of Erris in Mayo, and a woman fell 
dead and two others were mortally wounded. Within 
the following week the principal men of the League 
— professional men, mayors. Members of Parlia- 
ment, newspaper editors, shopkeepers, farmers — 
were snapped up in hundreds, until the jails of 
Kilmainham, Naas, Dundalk, Kilkenny, Galway, 
Limerick, Clonmel, Derry, Armagh, and Enniskillen 
were filled with suspects. To fill the Castle's cup of 
joy to overflowing, the Dublin Corporation refused 
the freedom of the city to Messrs. Parnell and Dillon 
by the casting-vote of the Lord Mayor, who was re- 
warded with a knighthood. Alas for the vanities of 
human prophecy ! " Believe me, it is a hopeful sign ! " 
cried the impulsive Gladstone. " Believe me, what 
Dublin did yesterday, Ireland will do to-morrow ! " 
What Dublin did "to-morrow" was to wipe out the 
Lord Mayor and all who followed him, and make 
Messrs. Parnell and Dillon freemen by an almost 



374 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

unanimous vote ; and what Ireland did was what 
Gladstone himself also did "to-morrow," namely, to 
cry " Bravo ! " and extinguish not merely the offend- 
ing Lord Mayor, but the offending Chief Secretary. 
But who could have foreseen it all in Forster's first 
months of honey as the strong man triumphant ? 
It seemed the easiest of victories. Forster, little 
heeding the lesson of history, that Ireland is never 
less conquered than when she seems most so, was 
supremely content with the results of his vigour. 
He had made good the lucklessly graphic boast of 
his Lord-Lieutenant, Earl Cowper. He had "suc- 
ceeded in driving discontent under the surface," 
and founding the conspiracy of the Invincibles. 

By stamping out harmless village meetings as 
though they were insurrections, he simply turned 
the League Branches into so many secret societies, 
from which the moderating influence of the quieter 
and more staid members of the community was 
henceforth missing. The spice of mystery always 
dear to the Irish imagination invested the illegal 
meetings of the Branches with a new charm. The 
work of eluding the police and trampling on their 
proclamations became the first duty of Irish wit and 
of Irish manhood. But there arose a more sinister 
phenomenon. Those who had all along disliked 
constitutional agitation found it safer to appear with 
masked faces, and in the midnight, and trust to their 
firearms for arguments, than to expose themselves 
helplessly to be maltreated and subjected to pro- 



XV THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 375 

longed imprisonment at the whim of any policeman 
who chose to suspect them,^ by holding fugitive 
meetings, and delivering snatches of interrupted 
speeches. By degrees the suspicious calm began to 
be rudely broken. It leaked out that five hundred 
of Lord Arran's tenants in Mayo had resolved to 
withhold their rents ; so did Lord Ventry's Kerry 
tenantry ; so did Lord Leconfield's in Clare, Lord 
Massereene's in Louth, Lord Athlumney's in Meath ; 
and so did the tenants of pretty nearly all the estates 
in the stiff-necked county of Wexford, almost every 
man of whom, I am thankful to say, time has justified 
in making him the proprietor of his own holding. 
More perplexingly still, the mass of the tenants 
neither met nor debated nor resolved upon any- 
thing, except holding their tongues and leaving 

^ An illustration of this view of things, which, but for the barbarity 
of the subject, would have its amusing side, came under my own 
notice. Among the highly respectable farmers and business men 
who constituted nine-tenths of the Kilmainham " suspects," there was 
one giant whom rumour darkly connected with the exploits of a 
Southern Ribbon Lodge, whose mode of warfare was to cut off the 
ear of an offending bailiff or land-grabber. One morning a group 
of the prisoners stood in the prison-yard, discussing a raid by Mr. 
Clifford Lloyd, R.M., on a peaceful town in the West, where he 
occupied both ends of the town with a military force, and then 
proceeded to arrest as " suspects " several scores of the principal 
shopkeepers, and charged with bayonets into a crowd that dared to 
raise a cheer for the prisoners. The Moonlight Captain, who was a 
taciturn man and usually stood apart, was suddenly moved by the 
recital. He cast his wideawake hat on the ground and trampled on 
it in an impotent fury, crying out, " Be cripes ! I always knew there 
was nothing for it with these fellows but the cheers ! " (which was 
his way of pronouncing the " shears " used in his midnight raids). 
Mr. Clifford Lloyd had triumphantly vindicated the policy of "the 
cheers " of the Kerry moonlighters. 



376 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the Rent Offices empty. Most of the male part of 
the congregation rose up and quitted Archbishop 
M'Cabe's Cathedral when his Grace's pastoral, 
denouncing the No-Rent Manifesto as Communism, 
and anathematising the National leaders in violent 
terms, was read. The landlords, for whom fox- 
hunting was all that the arena was for Nero, found 
their passage across the farmers' lands forbidden by- 
crowds of peasants, and were forced to turn home 
disconsolate with their hounds. If the crowbars of 
the evicting parties sent their terrors day after day 
to the peasants' hearts. Captain Moonlight and his 
murder clubs began again to walk the night. To 
crown the Chief Secretary's discomforts, the Ladies' 
Land League developed a power and an indomitable 
spirit compared with which it was child's-play to make 
war on their fathers and brothers.^ Mr. Forster after- 

1 The President of the Ladies' League, Mrs. Deane, a niece of 
John Blake Dillon, and the head of the oldest commercial establish- 
ment in the West — who, to the deep regret of half a province, has 
passed away since these lines were written — was one of those women 
of remarkable intellectual grasp and governing power, combined with 
tender sympathy, who might have been the Mere Chantal of an Irish 
Annecy or the Mere Angelique of an Irish Port Royal. Another of 
the matrons of exquisite domestic charm, who did not shrink from 
identifying herself with the movement, even under the fire of Arch- 
bishop M'Cabe's cruel reproofs, was Mrs. A. M. Sullivan, the wife of 
the famous orator, whom destiny compelled to abandon his shining 
place in Parliament at this interesting moment in order to devote 
himself to the Bar, and whom a further stroke of destiny deprived 
of his life, just when his success at the Bar gave him the hope of 
re-entering the political arena. But the true militant leader of the 
Ladies' Land League, its inspiration and guiding force in action, 
was Miss Anna Parnell, a sister of the Irish leader, who, it is not 
too much to say, was, in more than one respect, little removed in 
genius from her brother. 



THE NO-RENT MANIFESTO 377 

wards sought a revenge worthy of the brutal sex, 
when taunted with his failure to suppress the Ladies' 
Land League, by crying, "Yes, indeed, suppress 
ladies who were obliging me by wasting the Land 
League funds at the rate of ^1500 a week ! " The 
gibe was, however, a very thin and spiteful disguise 
of the fact that he did make a very savage attempt 
indeed to frighten the Ladies' League, and did 
actually subject some of the youngest and most 
refined of them to the worst humiliations of im- 
prisonment under a vile Statute of Edward the 
Third, directed against "persons of evil fame"; and 
that the reply of the ladies was to hold a simul- 
taneous meeting on a given Sunday in fifteen 
hundred parishes in the country, at which they 
proffered unfortunate Mr. Forster every possible 
invitation, in vain, to carry out his threats. One 
of the young ladies arrested described in a happy 
quotation — 

When she will, she will, you may depend on't ; 

And when she won't, she won't — and there's an end on't ! — 

Mr. Forster's ludicrous as well as impossible task 
of arguing by means of imprisonment or buckshot 
with some thousands of devoted women, who set 
themselves systematically to give effect to the No- 
Rent Manifesto by a combination of the modesty 
of a Sister of Charity and the heroism of a Boadicea. 



CHAPTER XVI 

A newspaper's fight for life 
I88I-I882 

It was another of the singularities of the Forsterian 
tragi-comedy, that I was able throughout the No- 
Rent movement to supply the journalistic stimulus 
and direction of the movement weekly from within 
the walls of Kilmainham Jail ; and that, while he 
was pursuing United Ireland in a fever from city to 
city of Ireland and of Great Britain, in at least ten 
of which it was published in turn, the writer of almost 
the whole of the perilous stuff that so weighed upon 
his bosom was all the time in his own custody. 
United Ireland was now the only visible emblem, 
the flag, of the outlawed League. There were two 
more or less justifiable ways of making war upon it 
— either by a prosecution of those of us who were 
legally responsible for the publication, or by the 
strong hand, smashing the types and locking up 
the concern. Mr. Forster's method had neither the 
legality of the one course nor the virile tyranny 
of the other to recommend it. He never openly 

378 



CH. XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 379 

suppressed the paper. He contented himself with 
throwing into prison everybody he suspected, either 
of writing for it, or of earning a mechanic wage by 
setting up its types, or tending its machines, or fur- 
nishing its accounts ; and he kept a regiment of poHce- 
men employed for three or four months in breaking 
into the shops of the agents who exposed its placards, 
and chasing for their lives through the streets the 
small boys who sold it. It was the reductio ad 
abstirdiLin of squalid unconstitutionality. Mr. 
William O' Donovan, son of the illustrious Gaelic 
scholar, and brother of the scarcely less famous 
war- correspondent, Mr. Edward O'Donovan, took 
my place as editor after my arrest. Before a fort- 
night, he was warned by a friend in the Secret Police 
that the Chief Secretary had signed a warrant for 
his arrest. He had barely time to escape to France 
before the Castle goshawks made their swoop. A 
fortnight afterwards, Mr. J. Bryce Killen, barrister, 
who succeeded him, was carried off to Dundalk 
Jail. The following week, his successor, Mr. James 
O'Connor, the sub-editor, joined me in Kilmainham. 
Mr. Arthur O'Keefe, the assistant sub-editor, who 
next stepped into the breach, was arrested a week 
afterwards. Next the commercial manager was 
arrested, and after him his two office clerks ; next 
came warrants for the foreman printer, his sub-fore- 
man, and one of his compositors ; and finally the very 
machinist, in his grimy blouse, was "reasonably sus- 
pected of treasonable practices," and sent to swell the 



38o WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

ranks of the prisoners in Kilmainham. From that 
time forth, United Ireland published weekly, in the 
place of its leading article, a black list of the casual- 
ties among its staff, which is probably unique in the 
history of the Press of these countries : — 



Freedom of the Press in Ireland in 1882 

William O'Brien, editor of United Ireland; arrested 
October 20th, 1881 ; Kilmainham Jail. 

William O'Donovan, literary contributor ; warrant filled for 
his arrest ; escaped November 15th, 1881. 

James Bryce Killen, B.L., literary contributor; arrested 
November 29th, 1881 ; Dundalk Jail. 

Michael A. Whelan, cashier; arrested December 6th, 1881 ; 
Kilmainham Jail. 

James O'Connor, sub-editor; arrested December 8th, 1881 ; 
Kilmainham Jail. 

Florence O'Keefe, business manager; warrant for his arrest ; 
escaped December 8th, 1881. 

Edward Donnelly, foreman printer ; warrant for his arrest ; 
escaped December 8th, 1881. 

Arthur O'Keefe, assistant sub-editor ; arrested December 
15th, 1881 ; Kilmainham Jail. 

Henry Burton, office clerk ; arrested December 15th, 1881 ; 

Kilmainham Jail. 
William M'Donnell, assistant foreman printer; warrant for 

his arrest; escaped December 15th, 1881. 
William Hunt, book-keeper; arrested December 23rd, 1881 : 

Kilmainham Jail. 
Mathew Reilly, chief machinist; arrested December 28th, 

1881 ; Kilmainham Jail. 
Thomas Duggan, agent, Loughrea ; arrested December 

28th, 1881 ; Kilmainham Jail. 

John Haltigan, compositor; arrested January 3rd, 1882; 
Dundalk Jail. 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 381 

It seems never once to have occurred to the 
Chief Secretary that the enemy against whom he 
was wildly flinging about his warrants was all the 
time doing his work from his own jail. My brother- 
prisoners included representatives from every county 
in the south, east, and west of Ireland. They were 
all allowed to receive their local newspapers. As 
the Freeman naturally shrank from publishing news 
as to the progress of the No-Rent struggle, it be- 
came a matter of prime importance to encourage 
the country by supplying it with the fullest possible 
information as to the extent and vigour of the 
National resistance. My plan was to collect from 
each of the suspects his own local paper, together 
with their private letters, received by subterranean 
agencies, giving particulars not otherwise attain- 
able. In this way my cell was converted into an 
information bureau, from which I was able weekly 
to dispatch many columns of exciting details, and 
many columns more of pungent comments, so that 
the paper, amidst all the crash and chaos in its 
editorial rooms, its printing staff, and its machinery 
room, became a more formidable foe, and the object 
of a stronger public interest than ever. And it is 
worth while mentioning, as a commentary on the 
Chief Secretary's spiteful arrest of Dr. Kenny, and 
dismissal of him by sealed order from his office in 
the Poor Law service, on suspicion that he con- 
veyed the No-Rent Manifesto out of Kilmainham 
Prison, that I was never without a choice of half- 



382 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

a-dozen different modes of conveying my messages 
to the outer world, uncensored by the Governor's 
eye. The Ladies' Land League gave Forster an 
additional grudge against their body, by drafting 
a body of sweet girl graduates into United Ireland 
office to take the place of the outlawed men ; and 
most unselfishly and valiantly, for several months, 
they kept its accounts, and supplied some of its 
most piquant writings, and foiled the police raiders 
by a thousand ingenious feminine devices for circu- 
lating the paper. 

Even Mr. Forster was not long in discovering 
that his policy of kidnapping and pin-pricking and 
petty larceny had but doubled the prestige of United 
Ireland as a missionary of the No- Rent Manifesto. 
He made up his mind to a more heroic stroke. In 
Christmas week a party of police burst into the 
office without even going through the formality of 
presenting a warrant, seized every copy of United 
Ireland they could lay their hands on, stopped the 
machines, broke up the formes and stereo-plates, 
and put an end to any means of producing the 
paper again on the premises. Then commenced 
perhaps the most extraordinary running fight that 
a newspaper ever before or since maintained for its 
life. The escaped foreman printer, Mr. Donnelly, 
had made his preparations for the emergency, and 
United Ireland made its appearance punctually the 
next week from London. Scotland Yard frightened 
the London printers after a few weeks with the 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 385 

threat of a prosecution. The paper turned up ini- 
perturbably, in the American phrase, "on time" 
from Liverpool. The Liverpool printers and stereo- 
typers in their turn found their premises haunted 
by detectives and their customers dogged about 
the streets. When these measures were not found 
sufficiently intimidatory, the worthy Englishmen 
were frightened in earnest by a formal prosecution 
for sedition. Glasgow carried us over one perilous 
week, "and then no more." Manchester was Mr. 
Donnelly's next headquarters ; but it was no longer 
possible to get your prosy English man of business 
to face the fire, before which the sentimental Irish- 
man felt the joy of battle. By the end of January, 
the remnants of our exiled staff — " few and faint, 
but fearless still " — found themselves installed in the 
Imprimerie Schiller, in the Rue du Faubourg 
Montmartre in Paris, and thence they dispatched 
punctually for several months, in its quaint French 
dress, a United Ireland more vivacious and defiant 
than ever, to keep the wits of the Irish police in 
a weekly state of delirium, and be handed round 
from Irish cabin to cabin as tenderly as the French 
officers whom they used to shelter in the old wars 
of Boney. 

It was difficult enough for me to keep up my 
supply of news and leading articles to a journal 
whirled about on this extraordinary Odyssey ; but 
my labour was soon complicated by finding that 
there were two separate editions of United Ireland 



384 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

In course of production — one of them of a humbler 
and more makeshift character, which was printed 
here and there in the Irish cities, as a precaution 
aofainst the seizure of the French edition at the 
ports. For several weeks I had to supply a double 
editorial budg^et to their several destinations ; but, 
indeed, in whatever city a publication had to be 
organised at a few days' notice, there were always 
volunteers at hand to write for it, to arrange for its 
circulation, and to take the risk of assisting in its 
mad adventures. Stephano was not more perplexed 
by the " strange noises " of the tricksy spirit of 
Prospero's Isle than was Forster by the mysterious 
visitations of this unseizable newspaper. One of 
the chief diversions of Dublin during these sad 
months was the weekly battle In the streets be- 
tween the gigantic Metropolitan policemen and the 
ragged newspaper boys, inside whose rags there 
were always concealed a few copies of the outlawed 
journal, and who found ample compensation for 
the very gross brutality with which they themselves 
were cuffed and their property confiscated by the pur- 
suing policemen, in the prices of is., or even 2s. 6d., 
they obtained for any copies that successfully ran 
the blockade, and Indeed, profit or loss apart, in the 
Irish urchin's sempiternal joy In eluding the grasp 
and whistling " Harvey Duff" in the ears of their 
huge, breathless pursuers. Sometimes the Chief 
Secretary had his victory, as when the whole of the 
first Paris edition was seized at Folkestone, before 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 385 

Mr. Donnelly had hit upon more ingenious con- 
tinental methods ; and when, on another occasion, 
30,000 copies were seized on arrival at the North 
Wall, stowed away in flour barrels. It was very 
seldom, however, that Forster had the best of the 
encounter of wits with the Ladies' Land League, 
who had charge of the circulation of the paper. 
One of the most common channels of circulation 
was by means of boxes of millinery, despatched to 
sympathising friends in the trade. There is even 
reason to suspect that, after the manner of carrying 
contraband writings across the French frontier 
under the Empire, the fugitive journal was not 
without its obligations to the petticoats of the 
emissaries of the Ladies' Land League, travelling 
through the country en mission. We were in nego- 
tiation with the skipper of a Boulogne fishing-boat 
for delivering the Paris edition weekly under cover 
of the French fishing- fleet, which hovers about 
the Cork coast in the spring and summer, when 
the word went out that the long war was over, and 
that, after the six months' duel, it was the news- 
paper, and not the Chief Secretary, that proved to 
be the survivor. 

The period of repose, in the hope of which I 
welcomed the cells of Kilmainham, proved thus to 
be one of the most laboriously active passages of 
a pretty active life. But it was sweetened by an 
exhilaration of combat and a companionship with 

revered and trusty men, and, it must be added, a 

2 c 



386 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

rugged courtesy on the part of our captor, which 
leave me scarcely a single memory of those six 
prison months that it is not a personal luxury to 
recall. I brought to Kilmainham perhaps as un- 
limited a store of faith in human nature, of admira- 
tion for goodness, courage, and capacity, wherever 
and in whatever varying phases it was to be found, 
and of incapacity to see the base side or the 
sceptical side of men, or movements, as, I think, 
most men are blessed with. If such a disposition 
in a world of cross purposes, and especially in an 
Irish world of excessive expectation and excessive 
disappointment, is only too sure to bring its crop 
of disillusions, the only change of which even the 
experiences of two Irish civil wars has made me 
conscious is the substitution for an unlimited belief 
in human nature of an unlimited pity for the in- 
exorable destiny of us all. If to know one is to 
live with one, to live with one within prison walls 
daily for six months ought to leave little for experi- 
ence to discover ; and I can say with a very clear 
conscience as to the men with whom it was my 
privilege to be in daily, almost hourly, contact 
during all these months of trial, that I left Kilmain- 
ham with a higher admiration, affection, and, it 
might well be said, reverence for them all than even 
the plentiful stock I had begun with. Mr. Forster's 
prison arrangements were unquestionably humane. 
All the prisoners were allowed to mingle together 
freely in the prison yards during the abundant 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 387 

hours of exercise ; to smoke their pipes, to read 
their newspapers, to play at hand-ball, or, if their 
tastes were more sedentary, at chess or dominoes, 
and to have their meals supplied by a friendly 
restaurateur (or, as it happened, restaurateuse). 
The following extract will give some notion of the 
lengths to which indulgence was once in a way 
pushed : — 

St. Patrick's Day in Dundalk Jail^ 

The National festival was celebrated by the Suspects 
in Dundalk Jail with great enthusiasm. After dinner, 
Alderman Mangan of Drogheda was moved to the chair. 
The toast, " The Day we Celebrate," was proposed by Mr. 
Synott of Manorhamilton, and responded to by Mr. D. 
M'Sweeney of Falcarragh, Co. Donegal. The topics dwelt 
upon were the unfaltering adherence of the Irish people 
to their ancient faith, and their inflexible steadiness to 
the principle of Irish Nationality. Mr. J. M'Morrow of 
Doura, Co. Leitrim, proposed the next toast, " The Irish 
Nation," to which Mr. J. M. Hubon of Loughrea responded 
in forcible terms. The remaining toasts — " The extirpa- 
tion of Landlordism " and " The Ladies' Land League " 
— were spoken to by Mr. Th. M'Grath and Mr. Dineen, 
Ballylanders, Co. Limerick ; Mr. M. J. Codd of Mount- 
rath ; Mr. J. W. Finn, Inchicore, Dublin ; Mr. George 
O'Toole, Mr. Mullet, Mr. Dorris, Mr. O'Dowd, and other 
Suspects. During the day several songs and recitations 
of a National character were given ; and while the celebra- 
tions went on inside the prison, outside the Dundalk and 
Drogheda bands were marching and counter-marching to 
the enlivening strains of their own excellent music. 

My own Christmas in Kilmainham was of a more 

1 Freematis Journal^ March 2ist, 1882. 



388 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

mixed, though scarcely less indulgent character. 
I was ill in bed, and had to undergo a not very 
serious surgical operation, which was performed by 
two of my brother-prisoners. Dr. Kenny and Dr. 
Cardiff of Wexford. The latter, a man of enormous 
size and girth, with the strong friendships and the 
uncompromising hatreds of the sturdy Wexford 
breed he sprang from, held his own knife over me 
with the threat to use it if I cried out, while Dr. 
Kenny's gentler hand made the necessary incisions ; 
and my terror of Dr. Cardiff's disapproval, rather 
than of his knife, kept me in a state of satisfactory 
subjection.^ But this was soon over. " The boys " 
were, as a special favour, admitted to my room, 
where there were toasts and songs and speeches, 
more joyous, I dare swear, than the Christmas 
dinner of the luckless Chief Secretary in his Lodge 
in the Phoenix Park, tearing his hair over the war 
despatches of his prancing police satraps. 

There came soon after an episode which makes 
me never think of Mr. Forster's name without ten- 
derness, for all his tragic blunders. My mother was 
unable to struggle up to the prison after her first 

1 Once a boycotted prisoner, who " signed conditions " to obtain 
his release, and was re -arrested shortly afterwards, fainted in the 
exercise yard, and the " suspects," lately so careful to avoid his com- 
pany, flocked around him with anxious faces. Dr. Cardiff continued 
to stride around the prison yard in stem aloofness. " Quick, quick. 

Dr. Cardiff," cried a warder, rushing up to him, "Mr. is dying!" 

" Let him die and be damned," was the reply of the savage old 
Spartan, who, " questions of principle " apart, was one of the kindest- 
hearted of mortals, grimly going on his way. 



XV, A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 389 

visit. She had been removed by kind friends to 
the Hospice for the Dying at Harold's Cross, where 
the angelic affection of the Sisters of Charity made 
her room an antechamber of heaven. One morn- 
ing, when all hope of seeing her again seemed to be 
lost, Captain Barlow, the Prison Inspector, arrived 
with a special order from the Chief Secretary that 
I was to be at liberty to go out with the Governor 
of the Prison to visit my mother, if I gave my word 
of honour not to attempt to escape. I stumbled 
through some words of gratitude for Mr. Forster's 
generous offer, but said I was sure he would not 
misunderstand me if I suggested that, in the exist- 
ing state of things, I could neither ask nor receive 
a favour from him. Captain Barlow made the just 
reply, "It is not a matter of favour to you, it is a 
matter of humanity " ; and I asked to be allowed to 
consult my friends, who with one voice put an end 
to any political scruple. 

Thereupon began a series of singular experi- 
ences, repeated from time to time for months. The 
Governor of the Prison would accompany me on 
an outside car to the Hospice, and ask me at what 
hour he was to return ; and after three or four hours 
by my mother's bedside, Captain Denehy would duly 
return with his outside car to reclaim his prisoner. 
On our first trip, visions of a rescue more or less 
haunted the mind of Captain Denehy, who was a 
simple-minded gentleman, full of an old-fashioned 
courtesy for his prisoners ; but he soon got rid of 



390 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

any apprehension of that sort, and came to enjoy 
the unexpected holiday so much, that he was always 
the first to ask me when I would make another visit. 
I shrink from dwelling upon all that these visits 
meant for the poor sufferer and for myself. Nor 
would it be easy to find words delicate enough to 
express my eternal gratitude to the Sisters, upon 
whose affection their patient had so gained, that 
they flocked about her bed like as many radiant 
spiritual children around their mother. But even 
my respect for the holy reserve that veils those 
noble women from the world — a reserve that does 
not debar them from visiting the lowliest of the lowly 
in the worst slums of Dublin, and yet surrounds them 
there with a simple majesty more awe-inspiring than 
that of queens — must not prevent me from mention- 
ing that I owe to these visits to the Hospice the most 
sacred friendship of my life. It is that of a Sister 
of Charity about whom alone a great book might 
be written — whose name is music in the garrets of 
the Dublin poor — who of the match-sellers and 
flower-girls of the streets has made adoring friends 
and mothers of happy households, and from a higher 
stratum of spotless Irish girls has furnished forth 
bands of missionary nuns, who bless her name 
in a hundred convents, hospitals, and lazarettos of 
America and Australia, of China and Hindostan, 
and Denmark, Norway, and South Africa. If one 
may dare to say so, Sister Mary Eustace is an 
international institution — happily for the English 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 391 

name, for she is an Englishwoman, whose genius for 
organisation, unsleeping energy and steadfastness, 
as unchangeable as that of the Northern Star, have 
done more to make the English character respected 
in Dublin than has been done by eight centuries of 
English governors and garrisons in the Castle ; and 
still more happily for our own island conceits, for this 
Englishwoman of birth, who has come to know the 
Irish character in all its depths and in its least lovely 
surroundings, has seen enough to be one of the most 
ardent of those of her country in every century who, 
once in contact with the enchanting Irish nature, 
have become Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores. 

The experiment of temporary release on parole, 
once tried, became general ; and, with more humanity 
than logic, Mr. Forster trusted the " dissolute ruffians 
and village tyrants " of his speeches, on their word of 
honour, to quit his prisons to visit their sick friends, 
to dig their potatoes, or even to attend an important 
cattle fair, and then return on the appointed day 
to their captivity. The word of honour, it is scarcely 
necessary to add, was never broken. The question has 
often been debated whether Mr. Forster by the lenity, 
or Mr. Balfour by the harshness of his prison regula- 
tions was the wiser in his o^eneration. It is certain 
that it was the failure of the gentler Forsterian prison 
rules to effect the conquest of Ireland that excited 
Mr. Balfour to try the sharper effects of hunger and 
degradation on his prisoners. The impression likely 
to be made in three quarters — upon the prisoners, 



392 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

upon the general Irish public, and upon the English 
public — had to be considered. Mr. Morley's book 
makes it clear that, with Gladstone's antipathy to 
coercion in its mildest form, neither he nor the best 
men of his party would have stood any attempt, by 
squalid personal humiliations, to break the spirit 
or the health of men who were imprisoned without 
trial, upon academic charges, upon the suspicion 
of any village policeman. I am willing to believe, 
moreover, that Mr. Forster was too just a man to 
lend himself to the experiment. So far as the 
effect upon the Irish people is concerned, it is quite 
certain that the indulgence extended to the prisoners 
diminished by at least one -half the indignation 
excited by their arrest. From the point of view of 
calming or stimulating public excitement, any one 
of the prison struggles between Mr. Balfour and his 
victims did more to madden public feeling, and make 
the name of " law and order " detestable, than the 
imprisonment of all Forster's thousand " suspects." 
Again, if the policy is to be judged by the effect 
upon the prisoners themselves, everybody who has 
seen the two systems at work will agree that Mr. 
Forster's comparative Capua was more dangerous to 
Irish moral than Mr. Balfour's arena of the wild 
beasts. No Nationalist worth his salt was other 
than braced by the privations and petty abominations 
of the later Coercion regime, while it was impossible 
to associate too much of the divine force of self- 
sacrifice with men who read their newspapers at 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 393 

comfortable breakfasts, and whiled away the after- 
noon in the ball-alley or over a game of chess. 
The one aspect in which, as I think, Mr. Forster's 
prison regulations were otherwise than shrewd, 
from the governmental point of view, was his plan 
of collecting the suspects together in free inter- 
course, in a number of special jails, where, as in so 
many colleges of a National University, the best 
men from every part of the country met to- 
gether and learned lessons of patriotism and of 
common purposes which nothing could ever after- 
wards obliterate from their memory. In all other 
respects, I have no doubt, humanity was also 
wisdom from the statesmanlike, and even from 
the coercionist, point of view. 

There was, indeed, one element of serpentlike 
calculation mixed with Mr. Forster's dovelike prison 
arrangements. The exultant remark he let drop 
about the prodigal expenditure of the League funds 
by the Ladies' Land League lets out the secret. 
As the suspects were allowed to get in their meals 
from outside, the privilege cost the League funds 
;Ci a week per suspect, and Forster had only to fill 
his jails with a sufficient number of prisoners to 
deplete the League exchequer by over ^1000 a 
week, which was the figure the support of the 
prisoners had actually reached in the November of 
1 88 1. But there once more Mr. Forster challenged 
an encounter with an antagonist against whom he was 
but poorly matched. Parnell at once saw the game, 



394 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chak 

and with an unswerving instinct made his move. 
He passed the word through all the jails that the 
suspects, after a date named, would go back to 
prison fare, in order to spare the Land League funds 
the crushing burden of their support. Needless to 
say, he himself set the example. The food question 
was, indeed, with him at all times of a profound un- 
concern worthy of the traditional Irish contempt for 
" the dirty belly." It was the mechanically ingenious 
view of the prison fare question, as of most other 
things, that chiefly interested him. The prison fare 
included twice a week a lump of inferior beef per 
man, and Parnell conceived the project of pooling 
all our lumps of beef together in a common pot, from 
which, with the aid of broken bread and of the 
vegetables fished out of the prison soup of the 
previous day's dietary, he concocted a famous dish 
of Irish stew. He and Dr. Kenny collaborated in 
producing this curious mess, over which, I am afraid, 
we grimaced more than over the unadorned prison 
food, but which was to the cooks a source of never- 
failing joy and pride. Parnell's calculation that the 
country would not long stand the disgrace of leaving 
its soldiers to pine on prison fare was almost 
instantly justified. A National tribute of enormous 
dimensions was subscribed within a few weeks. 
Far from emptying the coffers of the League, Mr. 
Forster found he had but minted a new coinage 
of ^50,000 or ^60,000 for its treasury. Another 
droll result followed. The mass of the poorer 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 395 

prisoners found that the prison fare mattered so 
little for the worse for them, that they decided to 
stick to it, and to lay up for their families the ^i a 
week which the new Fund allocated for the supply 
of the superior fare. The net result, therefore, of 
the Chief Secretary's ingenious strategy was that he 
both relieved the League Fund of a crushing charge 
and bestowed a pay of ^i a week apiece upon 
Parnell's household troops. 

It has been mentioned that six or eight of us 
were lodged together in " a concentration camp," of 
which Parnell's room was the dining-room and the 
club- window. It has often been a matter of bitter 
regret that I took no notes of our nodes coenaeque 
around the Chief's frugal table. At the time and 
for many a year after, anything I might put in 
writing was liable to seizure and official scrutiny, 
with the unfortunate result that my diaries were 
kept mostly in uneventful periods when they were 
least useful. Not, indeed, that Parnell was in the 
smallest degree a professor of table-talk. He would 
have been the last to understand Dr. Johnson's 
passion for "talking for victory," He was much 
more truly an admirer of Biggar's immortal axiom 
of obstruction : " Never talk except in Government 
time." At table, as everywhere else, he was simple, 
genial, unpretentious. But he was in the habit of 
dropping pregnant sayings, for any record of which 
surer than my own memory I would now give 
much. It was a pleasant little company. Mr. 



396 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Dillon was a book-lover, well read in travels and 
biography, and a gentle and refined companion ; 
Mr. O' Kelly had a provoking way of never affording 
more than a glimpse of his treasures of romance, in 
connection with the Algerian and Mexican wars, but 
he ever loved to construct ingenious schemes of 
foreign complications, which would bring about the 
assured downfall of England — if they would only 
come off; Dr. Kenny supplied the easy gaiety and 
cementing gift which make the social world go 
round ; and Mr. Brennan filled in the background 
with a certain air of mystery and reticence 
suggestive of the French Revolution without its 
noise. Our feasts were plain, but they sufficed. 
The farmers who at this time stopped the landlords 
from hunting, as a measure of reprisal, started 
''Land League hunts" of their own, and usually 
sent their bags by way of presents to the suspects. 
Hare soup, in consequence, became so frequent an 
item of our menu, that the dainty moved us to as 
ungrateful reflections as the " toujours perdrix " of 
the French royal epicure. 

There was no subject on which Parnell better 
loved to chat than America and the American 
Revolution. He would delight to trace Washington 
through his constant retreats and devices for 
avoiding battle, holding that to his willingness to 
decamp and play an inglorious waiting-game it 
was due that the insurrection was not promptly 
suppressed by the troops. "Washington would be 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 397 

a highly unpopular leader in Ireland," he would say, 
with a smile. For the United States of our day, 
bursting with youthful energy and rude strength, he 
had the admiration of one who was half American 
by blood and five-sixths in sympathy. He would 
always topple over Mr. O' Kelly's calculations of 
disaster to England from France or Russia with the 
observation : " Pooh ! The United States are the 
only people that could smash England. They may 
even be the means of freeing Ireland without the 
smashing." Once somebody was speaking slight- 
ingly of Robert Emmet's insurrection. " Emmet 
was not such a fool as many foolish people think," 
Parnell observed. " There was Napoleon with his 
Army of England cooling their heels at Boulogne. 
Any success in Ireland might have decided him to 
cross. Emmet's idea of striking at the Castle to 
begin with was a good one. He might have done 
better without bothering about uniforms ; but going 
for the Castle right away is the only sensible 
way of beginning in Ireland. The plan at the 
Fenian Rising of marching away from the towns 
was not business ; but of course the Fenians never 
had a chance after '65." He told us that his 
grandfather, who lived in Wicklow all through the 
insurrection of '98, and might easily enough have 
been hanged himself as a rebel, used to say that if 
a certain colonel of cavalry, who offered to take 
possession of Dublin Castle with his regiment for 
the Insurgents, had been listened to, Cornwallis and 



398 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the rest might have been seized ; and if Grattan had 
had the grit, he might have made an excellent 
bargain for ending the insurrection by a treaty 
reforming the Irish ParHament. 

Parnell's superstitions have been frequently and 
unduly dwelt upon. They always seemed to me 
whimsicalities that amused him, rather than beliefs 
that had any real influence. His objection to 
travelling in a railway carriage numbered 13, or 
any multiple of 13, would undoubtedly have caused 
him to prefer travelling in a third class of an 
unobjectionable number to travelling in a first 
class marked with the brand of ill-luck. For that 
matter, if somebody led him to a third-class com- 
partment, be the number what it might, I doubt 
whether Parnell would particularly notice whether 
it was in a first-class or a third-class carriage he was 
travelling. What is quite certain is, that any possible 
combination of thirteens would not have deterred 
him from completing his journey. His objection to 
the colour green, again, was genuine, and often 
laughable ; but arose, in my judgment, chiefly from 
a fear of arsenical poisoning. " How could you 
expect a country to have luck that has green for its 
colour ! " he once said. When I reminded him that 
green, as the National colour, dated no farther back 
than the United Irishmen, and that until then the 
Irish ensign was supposed to be blue, he responded 
smiling : " It's just the same — blue is more than half 
green." A lady worked for him, while he was in 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 399 

prison, a superb eider-down quilt, covered with 
green satin, with his monogram worked in gold 
bullion — a present worthy of a king. I am sure he 
must have sent a sweet and gracious acknowledg- 
ment, but the gorgeous quilt never rested on his 
bed. It was hidden away carefully underneath a 
press, where, I am afraid, the mice soon tarnished 
its glory. Lady devotees sent him innumerable 
other marks of homage worked in the dangerous 
colour — embroidered smoking-caps, tea-coseys, and 
even bright green hosiery. The latter he insisted 
resolutely on destroying ; the others he distributed 
freely among his brother- prisoners, until almost 
every man in the prison, except himself, had his 
green tasselled turban and green woollen vests. 
Very different was his appreciation of the red and 
yellow flowered silk eider-down dressing-gown pre- 
sented and manufactured by his own constituents 
in Cork, which he wore throughout his imprison- 
ment, free from all apprehension of ill-luck or poison. 
His terror of contagious disease was very real 
indeed. One evening, I happened to mention at 
dinner that I had got a note informing me that 
two of my sub- editor's children were down with 
scarlatina. "My God! O'Brien," he cried, almost 
in a panic, " what did you do with the letter ? " 
When I told him it was still in my pocket, he 
begged of me instantly to throw it into the fire. 
Seeing how genuine was his concern, I did so. 
"Now," said he, "wash your hands." This time I 



400 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

found it difficult to avoid smiling. He bounded 
from the dinner-table, and with his own hands 
emptied the water ewer into the basin on the wash- 
hand-stand. " For God's sake, O'Brien, quick ! " he 
cried, holding out the towel towards me, with an 
earnestness that set the whole company in a roar. 
He returned to his dinner in a state of supreme 
satisfaction. " Buckshot," he said, " is not going to 
get rid of us so cheaply as that." 

We were pretty plentifully supplied with books. 
Parnell's first thought for his own amusement was 
a carpenter's bench and tools. It must be owned 
that they would have outstripped all the poets, 
novelists, and sages in his favour. But the Prisons' 
Board, somehow, did not like the notion of arming 
their distinguished prisoner with hand-saws and cold 
chisels. Failing the carpenter's bench, he dipped 
into an occasional book of history or Roman Law, 
and always extracted solid fruit from it ; but, he 
used to say, " literature has no chance against the 
Freeman'^ Another indication of his mechanical 
genius recurs to me. A rich Irishman in Liverpool, 
Mr. Pat Byrne, presented him with a magnificent 
musical box, from which could be ground out five 
Irish Rebel airs. He delighted for a few days — 
not, I think, from any passion for music — to wind up 
the musical box to play "The Wearing of the Green" 
while we were at dinner. After a very few days 
the moderate cravings of his musical soul were 
satisfied. One morning we found him artistically 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOPv LIFE 401 

taking the costly toy to pieces to examine its 
machinery, and he found considerably more comfort 
in explaining to us, by the order and character of 
the nicks on the brass cylinder, how the sweet 
sounds were produced, than he had ever' found in 
the tinkling melodies themselves. His method as 
a chess-player was characteristic. He took a bold, 
quick offensive, and before his antagonist could 
tell what he was at, had landed a piece on the 
opposite side of the board, a-straddle between the 
opponent's castle and queen. A risky game, but an 
amazingly successful one, like his political career. 
Strangely enough, the most dangerous antagonist he 
found amongst all his brother-prisoners was a little 
Mayo peasant lad named Nally, who, until his 
committal to prison, had never seen a chess-board, 
but who often countered the Chief's dashing strategy 
by his own slow, watchful cunning ; and Parnell's 
temper never showed sweeter than when he was 
mated by the small Mayo peasant boy. 

His interest in the mechanical took another prac- 
tical turn. All through the winter rumours were 
constantly circulating of the removal of the principal 
suspects for trial in England. Parnell was constantly 
haunted by the belief that that would be Mr. Forster's 
last desperate move, and that, if tried, it would be 
successful, in the existing state of English prejudice, 
in procuring certain conviction and unscrupulous sen- 
tences. He had made up his mind to escape from 
prison, if the danger of being kidnapped to England 



2 D 



402 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

should become imminent. I think it was to Mr. 
Brennan — always an adept diplomatist in such 
matters — that he owed several opportunities of ex- 
amining the prison keys. It was a labour of love to 
him to take impressions of the keys, whose different 
compartments and intricacies had for him the charm 
a painter might find in tho. gribouillage of some Old 
Master. In a short time, a set of keys were manufac- 
tured for him by a Dublin locksmith from his models, 
and he was ever after happy with the knowledge 
that any night he pleased he might walk out of Kil- 
mainham without any serious danger of interruption. 
I have often been asked what were Parnell's 
religious views, without being able very accurately 
to reply. Every Sunday morning regularly, at the 
hour of Protestant divine service, the head warder 
presented himself with the stereotyped inquiry, " Are 
you for service to-day, Mr. Parnell } " To which, 
after a minute of deliberation, as if not desiring to 
kill off all hope in the soul of the head warder, would 
come the invariable reply, " No, I don't think so — 
not to-day." And we remarked, as all the com- 
mentators do of Governor Festus' promise to give St. 
Paul another hearing at an opportune time, that, for 
Parnell as for Festus, " the opportune time " never 
arrived. The Protestant prison chaplain, the Rev. 
Mr. Fleming, betimes paid him a visit in his room, 
and was always received with a somewhat frigid 
courtesy ; but Parnell had somehow got it into his 
head that the name was Fletcher, not Fleming, and 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 403 

he would persist in dubbing the chaplain ceremoni- 
ously "Mr. Fletch — ah," until the poor man gave 
up all hope of getting his catechumen so far as 
even conceding his own name to him. With the 
Catholic chaplain, Canon Kennedy, he was on 
much friendlier terms. The dear old gentleman 
would stay gossiping with him by the hour, on 
every topic except religion, and found it so hard to 
take himself off, that he sometimes stood glued to 
the floor, irresolutely rapping his thumb-nail against 
his teeth, until the clang of the prison bell, or the 
irruption of a warder, put an end to the interview. 
On religious topics Parnell was closely reserved, 
and never disrespectful. Catholicism was the only 
form of relio-ion for which I ever knew him to 
betray any tenderness. Long afterwards, when, in 
the smoking-room of the House of Commons, we 
were reading of the execution of Joe Brady and 
Tim Kelly for the Phoenix Park murders, he re- 
marked very gravely, "The Catholic Church is the 
only one that can make a man die with any real 
hope." The only positive opinion I ever heard 
him drop was once, after I had been inveighing 
against the insolent cruelty of the atomic theories, 
which Tyndall had at the time brought into vogue, 
and insisting what a gloomy farce they would re- 
duce human life to without the promise of im- 
mortality. He said softly, and with something like 
a sigh, " The only immortality a man can have is 
through his children." On one evening which I 



404 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

spent with him in his home in Avondale, we walked 
out by Moore's Meeting of the Waters, which lay at 
the foot of his demesne, luxuriating in the glories of 
a starlight night. Astronomy was one of his strong 
points — especially questions of the measurement of 
distances. He knew all the latest discoveries 
in the galaxy, and pointed out in what particular 
pinch of star dust, if my poor sight could discern it, 
some new asteroid was situate. From these excur- 
sions into the infinite heavens he warmed into wonder 
at the design, and, as I thought, into a reverential 
homage to the Designer, such as I had never seen 
him exhibit in so all but rapturous a degree before. 
He suddenly cut short the reverie with the remark, 
pointing to the millions of worlds in the blue, 
" We're a bit cheeky, aren't we, to take it for granted 
it is all for us on this absurd little ball of earth ? " 
and proceeded to explain to me the instruments by 
which the astronomers calculate distances and magni- 
tudes. He would not let me lead him back to the 
reflection that the human genius which discovered 
these things was an even better argument for an im- 
mortal spirit than the marvels of the starry universe. 
As the winter wore on, two things became mani- 
fest to us, talking matters over interminably in 
Kilmainham. One was, that the hostility of the 
Bishops and priests made it impossible for the No- 
Rent Manifesto wholly to succeed. The other was, 
that it would succeed sufficiently to bring Mr. Forster 
and his Coercion plans to a tragic collapse, and also 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 405 

to make the influence of the League almost as well 
felt in the the working of the Land Act as if the 
test cases had been allowed peacefully to proceed. 
The timid little Registrar of the Land Commission 
Court, Mr. "Billy" Smith, who immortalised him- 
self on the day of the Court's first sitting by declar- 
ing "The Court of the Land League" (the poor 
man intended to say "of the Land Commission") 
"is now open ! " gave an unconscious translation of 
the feeling in every mind, that whatever good was 
to come out of the Court would come out of the 
wholesome terror of the Land League, past and 
present. The loyalist farmers of the North, who 
tumbled over one another into the Land Courts in 
a mighty rush, lived to regret their greedy haste, 
while the Southern and Western peasants, who did 
not see their way to go the whole heroic length with 
the No-Rent Manifesto, used it skilfully to stipulate 
that payment of rent should only be made with a 
generous rebate. But it was an appalling winter of 
suffering and of crime on both sides. Mr. Forster 
delivered over great districts of the country, with 
sovereign powers, to four pro-consuls — Mr. Clifford 
Lloyd, Captain Traill, Captain Plunkett, and Mr. H. 
A. Blake — as to the vagaries of two of whom Indian 
sunstrokes may to some extent excuse them, if not 
their chief, for their mad brutalities. One of them 
issued a circular instructing the police to shoot at 
sight at anybody whom they suspected to be " about 
to commit a crime." Another, not to be outdone, 



4o6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

imported a kennel of bloodhounds, at whose head he 
scoured the country, until one of the brutes bit off 
the arm of one of his satellites, and so discredited 
that particular "resource of civilisation." A third 
actually advertised evicting landlords that he kept 
a staff of old army pensioners and ex- Indian officers, 
whom he was prepared to let out as emergency men, 
at wages named, to carry out eviction campaigns. 
Campaigns conceived in such a spirit were actually 
carried out by such instruments, upon an immense 
scale, with the fated result that the people, stripped 
of the protection of their open organisation, retorted 
no less savagely the tactics of the bloodhound 
captains and of the murderous police circulars and 
of the house-burnings. Lord Clanricarde's agent 
was shot dead in the streets of Loughrea ; a Mayo 
landlord, Mr. Isidore Bourke, was murdered, with 
his military escort. With the statistics of evictions 
mounted up the statistics of agrarian crime, fast as 
the cannon-shot after the blaze. After six years for 
reflection, the great newspaper that charged Parnell 
with organising the Phoenix Park murders made not 
the least scruple of charging that the agrarian crimes 
of this winter were organised with Land League 
moneys, and by Land League emissaries. It is in- 
teresting to remember that this theory was even 
then submitted to an enlightened English public by 
the Times collaborateur of after times, Mr. Richard 
Pigott, from whom Macmillan s Magazine stooped 
to receive an article denouncing the immorality of 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 407 

the No-Rent Manifesto and exposing the iniquities 
of the Irish leaders, who, when they did not steal 
the Land League funds, devoted them to hiring 
murderers and cattle - houghers. Mr. Egan re- 
sponded with a letter which, if the Times had kept 
it in mind, might have saved it some anxiety and 
treasure. He showed that Pigott's article was the 
vengeance of a blackmailer who had striven to ex- 
tort a large sum from him under threat of making 
some appalling revelation about the embezzlement 
of the Land League funds. But in those days 
there was no curing a simple English public of 
their faith in the Richard Pigotts. It is certain 
that some of the wilder spirits of the League were 
led to desperate deeds by occult conspiracies, to 
which the suppression of the Land League gave 
their opportunity ; but it is no less certain that 
some of the worst of the murder-clubs of this red 
winter were organised directly by agents provocatetirs 
commissioned by Dublin Castle. One case we 
successfully unearthed in United Ireland after- 
wards, at the risk of ruin — that of the murder 
conspiracy at Tubbercurry. It was conducted from 
start to finish by a head constable of the con- 
stabulary, Bartley by name, who was set up in 
Tubbercurry as a blacksmith, where he manu- 
factured pikes and swore in his dupes, and, from his 
forge, despatched them on their bloody business, 
and, to save himself from suspicion, brought the 
police to seize the pikes he had himself fashioned. 



4o8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

It would be an error to suppose that Parnell 
regarded the situation without grave anxiety. The 
frondeurs, who afterwards taunted him with the 
Kilmainham Treaty as an act of weakness when all 
was victory, had as little notion as such warriors 
usually have of the dangers that counterbalanced 
the apparent success of the No- Rent Manifesto. 
The time has not come even yet for fully setting 
them forth. Secret societies are in this respect like 
a wolf held by the ears — dangerous to hold back 
and dangerous to let go. The Irish secret societies, 
which were the disjecta membra of the Fenian move- 
ment, contained, it must always be remembered, 
some of the very best, as well as some of the very 
worst, men in the community. Parnell could never 
have created a National Movement worth England's 
while to conciliate, if he had not succeeded in 
attracting the cream of the Fenian men, so long as 
he was in a position to offer Ireland a better resource 
in open and constitutional courses ; but his arrest, by 
"driving discontent under the surface," had again 
given the upper hand to the fanatics, the desperadoes, 
and the agents provocateurs. Parnell, who had no 
precise knowledge of the intricacies and ramifica- 
tions of the rival secret conspiracies, which were 
always more or less simmering, especially in America, 
knew enough vaguely to be in a continual state of 
doubt where he might find the ground mined under 
his feet, or in what new direction the occult forces 
might explode. He was not deceived by the panic- 



XV, A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 409 

stricken cries of the landlords, nor by the bluff on 
our own side as to the extent to which the No-Rent 
Manifesto was operative. To a visitor who asked 
how his own tenants were behaving, he replied, 
with his pleasant smile, " They are standing by the 
No- Rent Manifesto splendidly " ; but he knew the 
cautious Irish peasant to the core, and had also a 
keen sense of the miseries which the struggle must 
produce. One day in February or March — it was 
probably the first time he was beginning to revolve 
the notion of a Kilmainham Treaty — he surprised 
two or three of us — Mr. O'Kelly and (if I remember 
aright) Mr. Brennan and myself — with the observa- 
tion, " Don't you think we have got about enough 
of this thing? The situation is all right up to the 
present. It is never hard to get the Irish farmer to 
defer paying his rent over the winter. But the time 
for the spring work has now come. They will all 
be asking themselves, Will they be there to reap the 
crop, if they put it down ? Most of them will pay 
up. They are doing it already. I know I should 
if I had a wife and family. A certain number won't, 
because they can't. They may begin shooting, but 
if they do, where is it to end? No, we shan't be 
able to bankrupt the landlords, but we can break 
Buckshot. After that, anything is possible." He 
did not pursue the subject further at the time. 

Up to this time, however, the No-Rent move- 
ment was thoroughly frightening the landlords. On 
December i6th, Mr. Norris Goddard, the fighting 



4IO WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

chief of the Property Defence Association, made a 
frantic appeal to the Lord Mayor of London to 
start a Mansion House Fund in aid of the distracted 
landowners, adding, " Unless help is speedily forth- 
coming, it will come too late." The London papers 
were full of fuliginous descriptions from their 
special correspondents of the state of Ireland : the 
tenants on vast estates proffering, in lieu of their 
rents, I.O.U.'s promising to pay on the day of the 
release of the suspects, and " withdrawing in a 
body" when the I.O.U.'s were not accepted; the 
boycotting system so much perfected that the 
Marchioness of Drogheda was obliged to milk her 
own cows, for want of a servant ; the Moonlighters 
roaming through Clare and Kerry, making the 
nights hideous, until one maddened landlord wrote 
to the papers to suggest the organisation of Vigi- 
lance Committees of landlord Moonlighters to roam 
the country in black masks, in their turn, and take 
prominent Leaguers out of their beds, and flog 
them or shoot them in the legs ; and, finally, the 
Coercionist Chief Secretary left without one un- 
bought friend in the whole island. And while the 
Mansion House Fund made but a sickly response to 
Mr. N orris Goddard's appeal, the Irish in America 
were contributing 250,000 dollars at the meetings 
addressed by Mr. T. P. O'Connor and Mr. Healy.^ 

1 Mr. O'Connor has often told me — and it is an eloquent com- 
mentary on the ignorant English prejudice as to the implacability 
of the Irish in America — that he and Mr. Healy found the utmost 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 411 

It was while affairs were in this position that 
Captain O'Shea made his first visit to Kilmainham, 
as the go-between of the negotiations with the 
section of the Cabinet in whose eyes already Forster 
was a Jonah whose doom was sealed. The world 
already knows all that is to be known of these 
transactions, unless in the very unlikely event of 
Mr. Chamberlain unbosoming himself of his confi- 
dences. I was myself released from prison a few 
days before the negotiations reached the crucial 
stage ; but to none of his colleagues, up to the last 
hour, did Parnell give more than a vague suggestion 
of what was passing. He afterwards told me that, 
until an hour before his release, he was afraid Lord 
Hartington would frighten Gladstone and save 
Forster. He spoke habitually of Mr. Chamberlain, 
Sir Charles Dilke, and Mr. Shaw-Lefevre as assured 
friends. He regarded Sir Charles Dilke as the 
more stable force of the three. He, like all of us, 
attributed to that statesman's unhappy eclipse in 
public life the divagations of Mr. Chamberlain 

difficulty in reconciling the majority of their Irish-American audiences 
to the No-Rent movement. Nothing but Parnell's arrest and the 
brutal suppression of the League could have induced them to give 
it any countenance. Mr. O'Connor's Irish-American experiences 
remind me of a little incident worthy of mention. One night, a 
week or two before the split of 1 890, " T. P." addressed a magnificent 
discourse to a great audience in Philadelphia, where the delegates 
from Ireland were beginning their campaign. " T. P.," I said, when 
we came together in the hotel afterwards, " if you could only make 
that speech all through the United States, we would go home with 
;^2 50,000." " My dear boy," was the genial reply, "that's precisely 
what I'm going to do. When Healy and I were out I made one 
speech seventeen hundred times on end." 



412 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

when Home Rule became practical politics. He 
often told me that Mr. Chamberlain used to say to 
him : "You might have an Irish Republic, so far as 
I am concerned, if you would only help us to dish 
the Whigs." -^ But Parnell regarded smoke-room 
blague of that kind not as things seriously intended, 
but as indications of a flippant and somewhat un- 
scrupulous habit of mind. He had a great admira- 
tion for Mr. Chamberlain's talents, and hoped for 
much from his combination with Sir Charles Dilke. 
" We could do a good deal for them, but," he said, 
"they can do nothing much for us without the Old 
Man." 

Mr. Forster knew that the thanes were deserting 
him. He pleaded passionately that the rents were 
being secretly paid up, and that all was coming 
right. But the omens were against him. It was 
calculated that, at the end of December, the tenants 
of estates covering 1,598,403 acres, and a rental of 
^1,439,246, were still holding out. Evictions, 
arrests, and sanguinary crimes were multiplying. 
The landlords, far from affording him any moral 
support, held a great meeting of 3000 landowners, 
in January, under the presidency of the Duke of 
Abercorn, to cry anathema against the Land Com- 

' Subsequently, in the days of Mr. Chamberlain's rampant rage 
against Home Rule, I mentioned the fact in a speech in his own 
constituency (March 17th, 1888), and he did not attempt to contest 
it, beyond making an affectation to deny quite another and irrelevant 
assertion, which I never made, that he had ever been asked to 
assent to an Irish Republic. 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 413 

missioners for impiously reducing their rental. 
Perhaps the crowning blow of all was that, when 
the Poor Law elections took place in March, by one 
universal impulse the country rose, and, in spite of 
a sorely restricted franchise, swept the landlords 
from their old ascendency at the Poor Law Boards, 
and put the most advanced of the suspects in their 
places, thus tearing away the last rag of verisimilitude 
from the plea that the people were only pining to be 
delivered from the Parnell despotism. Mr. Herbert 
Gladstone, who, possibly not without the knowledge 
of his father, came over in strict incognito to study 
the situation (he was discovered from the initials on 
his linen by the chambermaid of a Cork hotel, and 
was unmercifully chaffed by one of the young 
lionesses of the Ladies' Land League, while attend- 
ing a series of evictions), went back full of loathing 
for the crimes of the landlords and the brutalities of 
the police satraps, and convinced that Forster was 
living in a world of hallucinations as to the state of 
Ireland. In spite of all, the Chief Secretary went 
on his way of blunderheaded righteousness, with an 
unshrinking faith to the last. A few weeks before 
his fall, he made a surprise visit to Tullamore and 
to Tulla, in the County Clare, put his head out of a 
hotel window and harangued the people with the 
fatherly benevolence of a Messiah who had delivered 
them from the Land League house of death. Because 
the people listened to him in silence (under the guns 
of a considerable armed force), he returned to Dublin 



414 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

rejoicing, and a couple of nights afterwards assured 
the House of Commons that Ireland was wholly 
with him, except a parcel of "broken men and 
reckless boys," and that, give him but three months 
more, and he could say, " Catalina fuit." When, 
twelve months afterwards, the revelations as to the 
conspiracy of the Invincibles came out, it was found 
that, on the evening when Forster returned, a victor, 
to Dublin from Tullamore, persuaded that the back 
of the Irish difficulty was broken, the Invincibles 
were lying in wait, in armed parties of two or three, 
from the railway station to the Chief Secretary's 
Lodge, to carry out an elaborate plan for his assas- 
sination, and were only foiled by a mistake as to the 
hour of arrival of the train by which he travelled.^ 

Early on the morning of the 17th of April, the 
Governor of the prison came into my cell to 
announce my release. He begged of me to hurry, 
if I was to see my mother alive. When I reached 
the Hospice, I found that whoever had fixed the 
moment of my release had come perilously near to 
being too late. But the hour and a half, brief as it 
waS; which remained, was sufficient to make the 



1 The people of Tullamore expressed their true feeling the week 
after his visit, by ejecting an ancient landlord potentate from the 
chairmanship of the Board of Guardians and installing Mr. James 
Lynam, a suspect just released from prison, in his place. The Tulla 
Board of Guardians made an equally unkind response to his visit. 
At their first meeting they unanimously set aside the local landlord 
Panjandrum and Deputy-Lieutenant, who had been their chairman, 
and elected two of Forster's prisoners, of the most incorrigible stripe, 
as their chairman and vice-chairman. 



XVI A NEWSPAPER FIGHT FOR LIFE 415 

last scene one of unclouded joy and peace. Pain 
had ceased altogether for several weeks before, and 
our poor patient regarded my release from prison 
with as mercifully exaggerated a happiness as she 
had regarded the arrest with an exaggerated 
apprehension of the pains of imprisonment. She 
was so transformed with a serene content, that even 
the skilled eye of the Sisters was deceived, and 
there seemed no reason why I should not go on to 
the Imperial Hotel with my luggage, which was still 
waiting at the gate. When I returned, in less than 
an hour, all was over, except recollections of sisterly 
sympathy and angelic other-worldliness that can 
never quit my memory. 

Some time early in April, Parnell made a notable 
observation to me, which was accompanied with one 
of his brightest smiles : " Don't pitch into me too 
hard, O'Brien, if, like Micky Calligy, I sign 
conditions and go out." Micky Calligy was a 
poor Western peasant who was supposed to have 
purchased his liberation by signing a promise of 
better behaviour. It was the first hint I got of the 
Kilmainham Treaty, beyond the knowledge that 
Parnell's mind was running constantly on the 
necessity for some inodtis vivendi. A week previous 
to my release, Parnell himself had quitted 
Kilmainham, on parole, on April loth, to attend the 
funeral of his favourite nephew, whose mother lived 
in Paris ; but his observation could not have referred 
to this unforeseeable event. It was on his way to 



4i6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xvi 

London on this occasion that he was joined in the 
train at Willesden by Mr. Justin M'Carthy and Mr. 
Frank Byrne, the Secretary of the Land League of 
Great Britain. The judges of the Parnell Com- 
mission were solemnly asked to believe that their 
interview had reference to the organisation of the 
Phoenix Park murders. It will probably be found 
hereafter that it had more to do with communica- 
tions with Cabinet Ministers than with Invincibles. 
There was a feeling in the air that Parnell would 
not be taken back to Kilmainham. With his own 
impenetrable reticence and gift for invisibility, how- 
ever, he eluded all the efforts of newspaper men 
or crowds to ascertain his intentions, and returned 
to Kilmainham in due course of business. A week 
afterwards, the people of Dublin awoke on the 3rd 
of May to learn that Messrs. Parnell, Dillon, and 
O' Kelly had been released from prison the previous 
evening, had secretly got aboard the Holyhead 
mail-boat, and departed without saying a word or 
making a sign ; and a day or two afterwards Mr. 
Michael Davitt was set free from Portland Prison. 
Parnell had, as he jokingly anticipated, "signed 
conditions like Micky Calligy," but they were the 
conditions of a Treaty which recognised Forster's 
prisoners as the conquerors and left the unlucky 
Chief Secretary, armed with all the power of the 
Empire, a dismissed and broken man. 



CHAPTER XVII 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY AND AFTER 



Was Parnell's Kilmainham Treaty the surrender of 
a feeble leader or the triumph of a prudent one ? 
It seems a silly question enough now, but even a 
man of his staying power might easily enough have 
been permanently discredited by the murmurs raised 
in his own ranks, even in the darkest of those days 
when his policy was struggling to its feet, after the 
stunning blow of the Phoenix Park murders. As Mr. 
Forster believed in his soul he had only to get three- 
months more to complete the subjection of the 
League, the no less fatuous apostles of No-Rent at 
any price would insist that Parnell had enfeoffed 
himself to the Liberals at a moment when the No- 
Rent strike had only to get a free rein to be in- 
suppressible. By a phenomenon not unusual in 
Irish public life, those who murmured against the 
abandonment of the No- Rent Manifesto when it 
had served its purpose, were those who, having first 

fanatically preached No-Rent in the abstract, shrank 

417 2 E 



4i8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

from the responsibility of the No- Rent Manifesto, 
when the hour arrived for action, and even dis- 
covered reasons for condemning it. Mr. Davitt, 
who had found it his duty to place himself in 
opposition to the first official programme of the 
Land League, and to every official programme ever 
since adopted by the country down to the memor- 
able Land Settlement of 1903, was not long released 
from prison until he felt himself conscientiously 
compelled to repudiate both the Kllmainham 
Treaty and the No-Rent Manifesto, to which his 
name had been affixed by his close friend, Mr. 
Brennan, by virtue of a sort of power of attorney 
left to him for that purpose before his incarceration. 
His singular view of the Manifesto, adopted at a 
moment when there was no alternative except the 
self-effacement of the League, he thus explained in 
the New York Hei^ald : — 

While I admit the great success of the Manifesto as 
far as results were concerned, I think that it dulled the 
weapon which could have been used to give the final blow 
to Landlordism. Had the League waited until two or 
three hundred thousand tenant farmers were ready to 
obey it, it would have involved the eviction of a million 
of people. That would have been a measure which the 
Government could not have faced, and the result would 
have been the downfall of Landlordism. 

Mr. Davitt, however, was a horn fro7zdeur \ a 
picturesque and charming personality rather than a 
governing force. He has always good-humouredly 
pictured his own part in an Irish Parliament as that 



XVI THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 419 

of perpetual Leader of the Opposition, apparently 
without quite realising the constitutional corollary, 
that the freedom of that position might sometimes 
have to be exchanged for the responsibilities of 
government. He genially tells against himself an 
observation of Parnell, when they were once discuss- 
ing how an Irish Parliament would set to work for 
the regeneration of the country. " Suppose you were 
Prime Minister in the morning," he asked the Chief, 
" how would you begin?" "I think, Davitt," was 
Parnell's smiling reply, " I should begin by locking 
you up." But Parnell and all Irishmen of all bloods 
and all creeds would have taken care that the place 
of their wilful but beloved countryman's figurative 
captivity was a very paradisaic bower of roses 
indeed. 

As a matter of fact, the number of evictions that 
had actually taken place, comparatively small as it 
was, was sufficient to burden the funds of the League 
for many a subsequent year with an almost ruinous 
charge. Considering that these funds were running 
out at the rate of more than ^1500 a week when 
the Kilmainham Treaty stopped the drain, it is only 
too easy to calculate for how many weeks they 
would have held out, if the appalling figure of a 
million of evicted people, which Mr. Davitt so 
lightly contemplated, had been realised. Besides, 
Parnell's positive genius had resorted to a General 
Rent Strike not as a vague revolutionary fetish, 
but as a conditional act of reprisal, which had now 



420 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

accomplished its practical purpose. The ''vigour 
beyond the law " with which the outlawed organisa- 
tion had retorted Forster's illegalities had effected 
what the test cases would have accomplished by- 
milder methods. The Land Commission, which 
began with the theory that there need be no 
general reduction of rents, found itself obliged to 
decree an average reduction of 20 per cent on the 
Irish rental ; and it would be a puerile, if it were 
not a barbaric, dream to expect the Irish farmers, 
in face of such a prospect, to rush to their own 
extermination in hundreds of thousands, O'Connell 
left prison with a shattered reputation, and without 
a hope for the future of the policy for which he had 
been imprisoned. Parnell quitted Kilmainham as a 
potentate who had sealed the fate of the Minister 
who had imprisoned him, and as the ally of the 
Prime Minister, who had thrown the London 
Guildhall into a frenzy of enthusiasm by the news of 
his arrest. On the one condition of putting an end 
to a No-Rent Strike, of which he was at least as 
tired as the Prime Minister, he stepped out into a 
country where his power was more deeply rooted 
than ever, and to which he was able to make the 
royal gift of ;^ 1,500, 000 per annum struck off its 
rack-rents, and went back to a House of Commons 
which recognised the inexorable justice of his views 
both on the Land question and on the question of 
the Government of Ireland. 

The Tories vied with the Liberals in testifying 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 421 

to the soundness of his doctrine, that Landlordism 
must be abolished. Shortly before his release, Mr. 
W. H. Smith, as the spokesman of the Tory Party, 
introduced a resolution recognising Purchase with 
State funds as the inevitable final issue of the Irish 
Land question. The Committee which the House 
of Lords appointed to investigate the working of 
the Gladstone Act made a report that might well 
have come out of the Land League Offices. " This 
much is clear," was the comment of one of the 
principal landlord organs, the Evenmg Mail, " if 
the scheme proposed by the Lords' Committee be 
adopted, the Fair-Rent clauses of the Land Act 
which are now everything will be nowhere, and in 
two years' time the Social Revolution will be 
complete, and Landlordism, as it has hitherto been 
understood, will be extinct." "What is this," cried 
Mr. Morley, in the Pa// Ma// Gazette, already a 
dynamic force in these great events — "what is this 
but the programme of Mr. Parnell ? " " Only part 
of the programme of Mr. Parnell, as the Pa// Ma// 
Gazette will observe presently," was my comment in 
United Ire/and. 

Parnell was equally ready to take his allies from 
the Liberal or the Tory benches, and from either 
side of Westminster Hall. He was ready with 
definite suggestions for each. It has been foolishly 
claimed that Mr. Maurice Healy (one scarcely less 
gifted than his gifted brother, and who, if he had 
added to the excellent judgment which his better- 



422 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

known brother chiefly lacked, the readiness and 
keenness of tongue which made his brother famous, 
might have been a consummate Parliamentary 
leader) — that Mr. Maurice Healy, who was the 
able draughtsman of Parnell's Land Bil of 1882, was 
also the author of its provisions. The truth is, that 
before Parnell had seen Mr. Healy at all on the 
subject of the Bill, he had dictated to me in prison 
the main provisoes of his scheme in a communique 
which I published in United Ireland before my 
release. His idea of a satisfactory settlement of the 
Purchase question is of deep interest now, in the 
light of the fierce opposition offered by some lead- 
ing Irishmen to the far more splendid terms of 
purchase secured to the tenants by the Land Con- 
ference Settlement of 1903. 

" A clause is inserted " (I quote from my communica- 
tion to United Ireland oi A^nX 8th, 1882) "which provides, 
that the whole of the money for the purchase of holdings 
by the occupying tenants may be advanced by the Com- 
mission, and that in the case of holdings not exceeding 
£2)0 in valuation, the purchase-money may be repayable 
by instalments of £1 : i6s. per cent per annum, extending 
over fifty-two years, instead of instalments of 5 per cent 
per annum, extending over thirty-five years, as required by 
the Act of I 88 1. It is obvious that this provision will afford 
means to the tenant farmer who has had his rent judicially 
fixed, or who may agree with his landlord out of Court 
as to a fair rent, to purchase his holding upon easy and 
equitable terms, which would still farther reduce the 
actual payments made by him below the original fair 
rent fixed or agreed upon. For example, a tenant who 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 423 

has had, by the Court or by agreement, his fair rent fixed 
at i^20 per annum, would become the owner of his holding 
by making an annual payment of ;^ i 5 : 4s., instead of the 
yearly rent of ;^20, that payment to expire after fifty-two 
years, with the security of ownership in the meantime." 

These words, which were taken down by me in 
shorthand from Parnell's Hps, prescribed, as " easy 
and equitable terms " of purchase, a reduction of 
less than 20 per cent on first-term judicial rents ; 
and these terms he only demanded for the most 
necessitous of the tenants — those under ^30 valua- 
tion ; while the Land Conference Report stipulated 
that the entire body of the Irish tenants should be 
empowered to purchase at an annual average reduc- 
tion of 20 per cent, not on first-term rents, but on 
second -term rents, reduced by an average of 20 
per cent from the original rents, and by an average 
of 22 per cent more from the rents thus reduced, 
while first- term tenants were to be enabled to 
purchase at an annual average reduction of 42 per 
cent of rents, already reduced by 20 per cent below 
their payments before 1881. In other words, the 
Land Conference Settlement would have secured 
to all tenants the ownership of the soil, on terms 
substantially twice as advantageous as those which 
Mr. Parnell would gladly have closed with in 1882 
for only a small category of them ; and some of 
those who unhappily exerted themselves most 
actively to discredit and mutilate the Land Con- 
ference Settlement voted readily for the far more 



424 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

modest terms prescribed by Parnell in 1882 as 
" easy and equitable." 

But while Parnell was ready to discuss the 
Abolition of Landlordism with the Tories, he was 
ready also with palliative suggestions for the im- 
provement of the Fair Rent Clauses, to which 
Gladstone naturally clung with a parental fondness. 
One of the first practical fruits of the Kilmainham 
Treaty was an Arrears Act, for which his Bill had 
furnished the cue. His triumphs in the agrarian 
field, however, were but the smaller part of his 
spoils. Gladstone had been converted to Home 
Rule with a certainty which the nebulous impre- 
cision of the language events forced him to hold 
for years to come did not conceal from the pene- 
trating eye of the Irish Leader. In one of the last 
numbers of United Ireland, printed abroad (March 
4th, 1882), I had an article plainly indicating the 
change of front which was three years afterwards 
to startle the Empire. 

It is not in Mr. Gladstone's nature to say in plain 
words what he means, but we see no reason to doubt 
that he is really making another bid for the favour of 
the Irish people, and that that bid is Home Rule. He 
concedes the principle that purely Irish business should 
be under purely Irish control. All he wants is a plan, 
which any Parliamentary draughtsman could supply at 
twenty- fours' notice, by which an Irish Parliament ^A•ould 
be kept to Irish business. It is perfectly easy to see 
what Mr. Gladstone is at. He has staked his fame on 
the pacification of Ireland. 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 425 

When that article was written, Parnell was a 
prisoner, his organisation suppressed, nine hundred 
of his foremost disciples under lock and key, the 
very newspaper in which it was written printed in 
a foreign country, and obliged to circulate through 
Ireland as secretly as a priest of the Penal days ; 
to all outward seeming Coercion completely domi- 
nant, and the National spirit completely cowed. 
Two months afterwards, Gladstone was not only 
opening his jails and dismissing his Chief Secretary, 
and confessing the inadequacy of his Land Act, by 
promising to introduce an amending one, but he 
was placing Home Rule in the forefront of practical 
politics. The speech in which the most powerful 
Liberal Premier of the century disclosed the Kil- 
mainham Treaty to the House of Commons was 
one which, but for the tragedy in the Phoenix Park, 
would have accelerated Home Rule by a quarter 
of a century. He confessed that "the compulsory 
government of Ireland" would have to be given 
up. In weighty words he declared, in a House 
breathlessly silent (it was remarked) as it had not 
been since the suspense of the Crimean excite- 
ments, that " in my opinion, and in the opinion of 
my colleagues, there is a great deal to be done with 
regard to the reorganisation of the Irish Govern- 
ment " (as he put it elsewhere, " beginning with 
Dublin Castle and going down to the magistrates "), 
"and until we work in that direction we shall not 
permanently obtain tranquillity in Ireland." 



426 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Parnell bore himself in victory with a dignity 
worthy of the magnanimity of the other high 
contracting party to the Kilmainham Treaty. 
O'Connell left his prison in the midst of a gorgeous 
procession, which was destined to be the ghastly 
funeral obsequies of his power, Parnell slipped 
away from Kilmainham in a cab, and was on board 
the mail-boat for England, while bands and excited 
crowds were searching here, there, and everywhere 
for him in Dublin. Nor was the attitude of the 
Irish people less worthy of the great occasion of 
international reconciliation that had arisen. " Re- 
ports of rejoicings," I wrote in United Ireland of 
May 6th {dies infanda !), "heart-thrilling, but not 
indecent and not boastful, pour in on us as we go 
to press, like one endless salute of National artillery. 
. , . Mr. Forster has vanished, the Irish Nation 
has won, and can afford to give up exulting over 
his grave." 

The released leaders were commended for "point- 
ing the true moral of the situation by returning 
quietly to their business in Parliament, and declining 
to celebrate their vindication with vulgar triumph- 
ing." The mind of the country was, I think, 
accurately reflected in the first leading article of 
the same issue, headed " Coercion gives up the 
Ghost ! " 

Mr. Forster has resigned ! Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, 
and Mr. O'Kelly are free ! The prisons are to be cleared 
out — so is the Castle ! As dramatic a climax as any- 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 427 

thing in history — a Roman Triumph, only it is the 
captives who have mounted into the Conqueror's car. 
We don't want our people to lose their heads with giddy 
joy. The end is not yet. Coolness, vigilance, and 
courage will be as needful to secure what we have won 
as they were to win it. 

It v^^ound up v^^ith this notable reference to one 
of those events w^hich " might have been " : 

The best information seems to point to Mr. Chamber- 
lain as the man who, having overthrown Mr. Forster in 
the Cabinet, is bound to replace him in the Irish 
Secretaryship. He shall have a fair field. More than 
that we cannot undertake to say. 

It was, perhaps, a good deal to say for a journal 
that had been for six months hunted for its life 
over half Europe, and for a country that had been 
driven to the verge of madness by every species of 
coercive torture and landlord ferocity. A w^eek 
afterwards the journal which contained these 
counsels of peace to the Irish people was being 
denounced as having instigated the Phoenix Park 
murders ! 

Nothing short of one of those fiendish strokes of 
fate which one is sometimes tempted to believe to 
be hapless Ireland's peculiar heritage could have 
marred the situation thus created by the genius of 
two great men, wielding without question the power 
and the goodwill of the two islands. So absolutely 
untroubled seemed the horizon, that the night after 
that week's issue of United Ireland was got to 



428 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

press, I set off with an easy mind for the hoHday 
which the labours and sorrows of seven tragic 
months had rendered an urgent matter. Three 
days afterwards, as I was walking on one of the 
great boulevards of Paris with Mr. Egan and 
Father Sheehy, we stopped at a kiosque to buy 
one of the Sunday papers, and read that the new 
Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the 
Under Secretary, Mr. Burke, had been murdered 
the previous afternoon in the Phoenix Park, almost 
under the eyes of the new Lord- Lieutenant, Earl 
Spencer. The holiday came to an abrupt end. I 
returned by the night mail to London, on my way 
to Ireland, to see what could be done, if anything, to 
save the movement from the red ruin that, sudden 
as an outburst of hell's fires, had opened under- 
neath us. I found Parnell and his colleagues 
literally speechless. We sat for hours together, 
and could find nothing except some ghastly banali- 
ties to say. Biggar was the only Stoic of the lot, 
but nobody had any longer heart enough to smile 
at his bizarre optimism. The day of joy that Mr. 
Davitt's release from prison ought to have been 
was turned into a day of humiliation. His cry, "I 
wish to God I had never left Portland ! " is a tragedy 
in eternal black. His first day of freedom, on re- 
turning to London, was spent in preparing, with 
Messrs. Parnell and Dillon, the address to the Irish 
people, which was issued in their joint names. 
Critics have found fault with its tone as savouring^ 



THE KILMAIlNHAM TREATY 429 

too strongly of self-abasement and despair.^ Fault 
had been particularly found with Parnell's intimation 
to Gladstone that he was prepared to withdraw 
from public life altogether, if the other parties to 
the Kilmainham Treaty deemed it desirable. It 
was said to be an undignified act of submission from 
the Irish Leader to the English Premier. The 
critics were no less severe upon my own substitu- 
tion for the cartoon in the next number of United 
Ireland of a black-bordered cenotaph with the in- 
scription : "In token of abhorrence and shame for 
the stain cast upon the character of our nation for 
manliness and hospitality," by the assassination of 
Lord Frederick Cavendish and his brother-victim. 
It was said (and Biggar said it in words of some- 
what brutal detachment, worthy of a Tunes leading 
article on the blowing to pieces of a Russian Grand 
Duke) that all these manifestations were excessive 
and hysterical, in reference to a crime for which 
English misgovernment had a deeper responsibility 
than Irish leaders, who had striven their best to 

^ It is not unworthy of remark that the phrase " the PoHcy of 
ConciHation," which Messrs. Dillon and Davitt felt it their duty to 
inveigh against, in every form of sarcasm and contempt, in their 
campaign against the far more widespread and benign Land Settle- 
ment of 1903, and with scarcely less tragic results for the Irish 
Cause, was first invented in this Manifesto signed by Messrs. Parnell, 
Dillon, and Davitt, in lamenting the ruin brought upon the Irish 
cause by the Phoenix Park murders. " In this hour of sorrowful 
gloom," the Manifesto said, " we venture to give an expression of our 
profound sympathy with the people of Ireland in the calamity which 
has befallen our cause through a horrible deed, and with those who 
had determined at the last hour that a policy of conciliation should 
supplant that of terrorism and national distrust." 



430 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

keep discontent within constitutional bounds. But 
they who argue thus have but a poor comprehension 
either of the extent of the National catastrophe 
caused by the Phoenix Park murders or of Parnell's 
determination to prove, above all things, that if the 
tragedy was to be the means of tearing up the 
Kilmainham Treaty, the disaster must not be laid 
at the doors of any ill-faith or equivocation on the 
part of the Irish signatories to the compact. No- 
body knew from whom the crime had proceeded, 
or what was the object of the perpetrators. It is 
pretty clear now that it was the result of an access 
of blood fury on the part of some desperado, who, 
finding all the elaborate plans of his co-conspirators 
for taking the life of Mr. Forster to be in vain, 
turned their weapons against his subordinate rather 
than let their dreaded Invincible Conspiracy end in 
smoke. The first time I heard even of the name of 
the Invincibles was from a black-bordered threaten- 
ing letter which was left in the letter - box of 
United Ireland office on the night after the murders, 
intimating that the Under Secretary had been 
" executed " by order of that mysterious body. 
Even this I did not see until my return to Dublin. 
The only theory we could form that day in 
London was that the tragedy was either the 
outcome of some dark police plot to enmesh the 
Irish leaders or a stroke of vengeance from some 
occult enemies of the Kilmainham Treaty, with a 
view to making its conciliation policy null and void. 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 431 

I walked down to the House of Commons that 
Monday afternoon with Mr. Healy and Mr. John 
Barry. There was an excited crowd around Old 
Palace Yard, and we walked through them not 
without some doubts whether our journey would 
not come to a conclusion on the neighbouring lamp- 
posts. Nobody pointed us out, however, and 
electric though the indignation of the hour was, it 
was too deep for mere rowdyism. It was one of 
the occasions on which the House of Commons can 
be as majestic as a funeral service in Westminster 
Abbey. Gladstone spoke with the bowed head of 
an old man stooping over the open grave of a child 
of his heart ; Parnell bore himself with a grave 
dignity that was more striking still. There were 
three or four ill-mannered growls from a group of 
Irish Tories when he rose, but by the end of his 
first sentence he had conquered the respectful 
silence, and even sympathy, of an assembly which 
was, nevertheless, rocking with the fires of a 
suppressed volcano. How finely just the House of 
Commons can sometimes be in great moments was 
never better proven than by the fact that Forster 
was the only man whose speech set their teeth 
on edge. There was something in the rugged 
righteousness and aggressive self-justification, not 
to say self-jubilation, of the dethroned Coercionist 
that smacked rather of triumph than of the subdued 
feeling proper to an hour in which everybody felt 
the relations of the two countries were undergoing 



432 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

a tragic change. His offer to return to Ireland and 
fill the breach left by the murdered Chief Secretary 
had a note of bad taste — it would be unjust to say 
of conscious bravado — which caused nobody to be 
surprised to hear that the offer was declined. 

Ministers and House had only to rise one stage 
higher of magnanimity, and the Phoenix Park 
murders, instead of being the signal for denouncing 
the Kilmainham Treaty between the two countries, 
might have that day made it an eternal bond of 
amity between them. I don't think it was any deep 
ill-will of the English people that made that 
supreme flight of magnanimity impossible. I am 
quite sure it was no lack of courage on the part of 
Gladstone, if he had only listened more to the 
promptings of high statesmanship, and less to the 
electioneering calculations of party managers ! Such 
is the waywardness of our poor human destiny, it 
is almost certain that, if the Invincibles had only 
carried out the plans with which they entered 
the Phoenix Park, which contemplated the murder of 
Mr. Burke and of Mr. Burke alone, the Kilmainham 
Treaty would have fared forward without any 
serious interruption from a reaction in England. It 
was the seemingly appalling perfidy of the slaughter 
of a beloved and gallant Englishman, after he had 
been only a few hours in the country, as the bearer 
of a flag of peace and friendliness, that filled 
England with a horror that could no longer be 
reasoned with ; and yet we all know now that even 



XVII THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 433 

the Phoenix Park murderers never dreamt of in- 
cluding Lord Frederick Cavendish in their plot ; 
that they struck at him only when he had bravely 
striven to beat back the assailants of his companion, 
and that it was only the next morning they 
learned from the newspapers whom it was that 
they had slain. It was probably not more than a 
dozen writers of leading articles in the English 
Press who, in their own ignorance and in the im- 
measurable ignorance of Irish affairs in England, 
were responsible for reopening the war between 
the two nations, by a series of articles reeking with 
race hatred and appealing to the most savage 
prejudices, by depicting the murder of the peace- 
bearing English ambassador as the work of the 
Irish leaders, halloo'd on by a brutish and felonious 
Irish people. So unfathomably were they astray as 
to Ireland, that it is certain United l7'e/and^ did not 
exaggerate when I wrote : 

If the murderers had set to themselves the mission of 
doing more than centuries of English rule could do to 
break down the barriers between the people and the 
officers of justice, they could not have better succeeded. 
It is the simple truth to say that the assassins would have 
run a more instant risk of being lynched in Dublin than 
in London. 

Had England and her statesmen allowed them- 
selves to be guided by the woman's instinct which 
prompted the widow of the murdered Chief Secretary, 

1 May 13th, 1882. 

2 F 



434 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

in words of immortal beauty, to offer up his death as 
a peace-offering between Ireland and England ; had 
Mr. Chamberlain taken up the Chief Secretaryship 
when Lord Frederick Cavendish fell, and proceeded 
boldly upon the principles of Irish Government 
which he then no doubt sincerely believed in ; had 
Earl Spencer, the new Lord-Lieutenant, developed 
in that hour of hours the breadth of view and noble 
fortitude he displayed in after years in the affairs of 
Ireland ; had Gladstone, still in the flower of his 
age and genius, and with his unbroken Midlothian 
majority behind him, elected to confront the cave 
of Forsters, Goschens, and Hartingtons that was 
forming, and to go on unflinchingly with his 
promised programme of abandoning "the compulsory 
government of Ireland," and "beginning with the 
reorganisation of Dublin Castle," which he so 
heroically attempted many a year afterwards, with 
failing powers and an ill-disciplined Party — different 
indeed would be the golden page on which History's 
Muse might have written the story of twenty years 
that have demoralised and subjugated the Parliament 
of England and wasted away another half a million of 
the population of Ireland in Coercion struggle after 
Coercion struggle and embitterment upon embitter- 
ment. The die was cast, however. In the very 
speech in which Gladstone nobly mourned the dead, 
he felt himself compelled to reopen the wounds of the 
living. " So far as the Government is concerned," 
he said, in words of which everybody knew the 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 435 

meaning, " all previous arrangements and intentions 
must be considered, and to some extent recast." He 
went further and added : " We intend to ask the 
House on Thursday next to permit us to introduce 
a measure relating to the repression of crime in 
Ireland"; and the muffled chorus of content that 
ran through the House proved that the temple of 
Janus once more stood wide open. Parnell himself 
confessed there was no breasting the torrent. " As 
to the steps which the Government propose to take," 
he said, " I do not deny that they may feel impelled 
to take some steps in the direction indicated by the 
Prime Minister, but I wish to express my belief 
that this crime has been committed by men who 
absolutely detest the cause with which I have been 
associated, and who have devised that crime and 
have carried it out as the deadliest blow in their 
power against our hopes and the new course which 
the Government have taken." 

"We have got to begin all over again," Parnell 
remarked, as we walked up and down the corridor 
outside the Library, after the adjournment of the 
House. "But" — with the indomitable tenacity of 
the man — " I think we shall save the Arrears Bill." 
Though the heavens were falling, he was looking 
around steadfastly to see what could be saved from 
the ruins. 

" Ot all living Irishmen," wrote Mr. Healy in his 
Parliamentary Letter to United Ireland, " Mr. Parnell is 
the most to be pitied. The whole public burden of a 



436 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

deed which wrecks his prospects, and is abhorrent to his 
soul, falls upon his shoulders, and now must he address 
himself to the task of facing a Coercion Bill which his 
Party have done nothing to provoke, but which they must 
meet with proper spirit, despite the odious and clamorous 
cries of reawakened British ferocity." 

The Coercion Bill was introduced three days 
later, and was a declaration of war upon human 
liberty as savage as anything for which even the 
annals of English misgovernment in Ireland could 
furnish a model. Trial by jury was to be abolished, 
and trial by three Castle Judges, picked out for the 
purpose by the Lord-Lieutenant, to be substituted ; 
the people were to be kept fast prisoners in their 
own houses after dark, where any policeman who 
chose was free to invade them, night or day, with- 
out a warrant ! Newspapers were made liable to 
seizure whenever the Lord -Lieutenant objected to 
their contents, and fines beginning with ^200 were 
allowed to be inflicted on the Lord -Lieutenant's 
ipse dixit in increasing ratio, until the objectionable 
journalist was bankrupted and crushed. Finally, 
Mr. Forster's mad ex-Indian Captains, the Resident 
Magistrates, were empowered to sit as summary 
Judges, and send any citizen to prison at hard 
labour for six months, without trial, for any word or 
act that these Condottieri chose to construe as 
"intimidation." Mr. Forster was justified in rising 
triumphantly from his back bench to claim those 
brutal measures of repression as his own, and to 



THE KILMAINHAM TREATY 437 

taunt the Government with sitting meekly at his feet 
to copy the programme they had a week before parted 
company with him for insisting upon. There was and 
could be no answer. The country with which a treaty 
of conciliation had just been signed, and which with 
all its heart and strength had welcomed the message 
of peace with a sincerity worth more to English states- 
manship than the winning of a great battle, was, by 
reason of the murder of one Englishman, who was 
not even known to his murderers, delivered over once 
more to a campaign of vengeance that left its burn- 
ing mark on a nation's soul for many a bitter day 
to come. 

A handful of the Irish members fought with a 
splendid fortitude against the tide. They uttered 
warnings which turned out to be prophecies, but 
which were scoffed at as threats. Mr. Morley was 
almost the only journalist of repute in England who, 
while the hurricane was at its fiercest, had the 
courage to remind the House of Commons, in the 
Pall Mall Gazette, that the "warnings of Irish 
members have a most unpleasant knack of coming 
true." As well try to put a bridle on the sounding 
storms. The Bill was whirled through as in a rush 
of many waters. Four or five Englishmen — Mr. 
Labouchere, Mr. Joseph Cowen of Newcastle, Mr. 
Storey, and Mr. Jesse Collings — alone stood out like 
mountain peaks over the deluge. Only 45 members, 
out of the entire Parliament of England, registered 
a vote against the Second Reading. Mr. Healy 



438 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xvn 

spoke for a whole indignant Irish race when he 
told the pack of legislators howling round him that 
"they might pass their statute and do their worst. 
He would as lief reason with a horde of Zulus." 

The work of National Reconciliation fell to pieces 
in the hands of Gladstone and Parnell at one impish 
stroke from the destiny that seems to preside over 
the relations between the two islands. Perfectly 
honest Englishmen managed to persuade them- 
selves they were dealing justly in treating the Irish 
nation as a nation of Phcenix Park murderers, and 
Irish indignation bethought itself once more of the 
traditional Gaelic warning against the perfidy of 
"the Saxon smile." The Treaty of Kilmainham, 
like the violated Treaty of Limerick, " was broke 
ere yet the ink wherewith 'twas writ could dry." 



CHAPTER XVIII 



THE DEEPEST DEPTH 



To the anxieties of Parnell's struggle against a 
crushing repressive law, following on the collapse 
of all his plans, were added troubles in his own 
camp. On the principle of catisa victa vilescit, they 
were the inevitable consequence of a shining victory 
turned into a great defeat. Those who had objected 
to the No- Rent Manifesto being put forward now 
objected to its being dropped. The Kilmainham 
Treaty began to be murmured against as a weak 
surrender to the Liberals, if not an actual recantation 
of Home Rule. The Coercion Act was mockincly 
pointed to as the fit reward of faith in England's 
promises. It was even broadly suggested that the 
Parliamentary fight against the Coercion Bill was 
watered down, as the price of a contemptible 
Arrears Bill. The rift between the Country Party, 
who had but scant respect for the fireworks of 
Parliamentary warfare, and the Parliamentarians, 
who, under their breath, were apt to speak no less 

439 



440 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

irreverently of the fireworks of those who loved to be 
esteemed " the extreme men," grew wider and wider. 

Mr. Henry George had sailed from America on 
the first news of the No-Rent Movement, in which 
he thought he discerned an opportunity for a first 
grand practical experiment of his theories of the 
Nationalisation of the Land. The fact that he was a 
free-speaking American, in an hour when free speech 
was under a ban, and that he came supported with 
all the well-deserved influence of the Irish World, 
secured for him a ready hearing from audiences who 
comprehended little of his doctrines, except that he 
associated with them the name of Michael Davitt. 
Mr. George, however, was a poor speaker, and soon 
knocked up against the fatal inadaptability of his 
theories to the circumstances of the country and to 
the Irish peasant's ineradicable longing for the 
ownership of the soil. 

But the release of Mr. Davitt, and the breaking 
up of all the old methods and lines of demarcation 
which followed the Phcenix Park tragedy and the 
new Coercion Bill, put an entirely new face on the 
situation. Like all thinking men who have spent 
many months shut up with their own thoughts, far 
from the scene of action, he came out with a stronger 
bent than ever towards his original Nationalisation 
programme, and a tendency to see only the weak 
points in a good deal that had happened in his 
absence. In the only speech he made in Ireland,^ 

1 Kilkenny, Mav 22nd. 



xviii THE DEEPEST DEPTH 441 

indeed, he announced that "he would say nothing 
calculated to give embarrassment in the present 
critical phase of National policy"; but a speech of 
his the following Sunday in the Free Trade Hall, 
Manchester, on the occasion of a lecture by Mr, 
Henry George, left no doubt that he considered the 
moment an opportune one for restarting the move- 
ment on a Nationalisation basis. He was courteous 
and circumspect, but scarcely the less unmistakable 
in his criticisms of Parnell's policy. 

" Mr. Gladstone deceived himself egregiously," he said,^ 
" if he believed the Land League movement is about to 
efface itself, because he has been converted to Mr. Parnell's 
views upon the Arrears question, and accepted the 
services of Mr. O'Shea in effecting the Treaty of Kil- 
mainham. I think it well to remind the jubilant Whigs, 
who believe they have captured the whole Irish Party 
through the diplomacy of a political go-between, that the 
Land League movement was organised to effect the com- 
plete abolition of Irish Landlordism, and that, until the 
work is freely and completely performed, there can be no 
alliance between the people of Ireland and any Whig 
Party." 

And, with a somewhat sanguine estimate of the 
progress Mr. George's theories were supposed at 
the moment to be making, he intimates distinctly 
that not Peasant Proprietary, but that Nationalisa- 
tion, which is the negation of all individual 
proprietorship, must be the substitute for Land- 
lordism : — 

1 United Ireland^ May 27th. 



442 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

" Three years ago, when the cry of ' the Land for the 
People ! ' went up from a meeting in the West of Ireland, 
it was received with astonishment by our own countrymen, 
and branded at once as quixotic and wicked in England. 
Yet an organisation for effecting the Nationalisation of 
the Land in this country " (England) " is now numbered 
among its political forces, and has at its head such 
enlightened minds as Dr. Russel Wallace and Dr. Clarke. 
. . . Those who believed with myself that Peasant 
Proprietary — immensely preferable though it be to Land- 
lordism — would not meet to the full the final solution of 
the Irish social problem were, two short years ago, put 
down as Utopian dreamers, yet one of the most respected 
Bishops " (Dr. Nulty of Meath) " has since proclaimed, that 
the land of a free country is the common property of the 
people of that country." 

It has already been explained that what "the 
meeting in the West" meant by the cry of "the 
Land for the People ! " was not the Georgian theory 
of common property in the soil, by the whole 
population (a theory that had never once presented 
itself to their comprehension), but the redistribution 
among the small holders of the rich grazing tracts 
from which their fathers had been evicted in the 
Famine "clearances" — a programme which they 
understood fifteen years before their leaders did, 
and which the Purchase Act of 1903 has conse- 
crated as the true and statesmanlike solution of 
the problem of Western Congestion. Mr. Davitt 
followed up his speech in Manchester with another 
and still more decisive discoui's-pi'ogramme in 
Liverpool, on June 6th. He revealed the line of 



THE DEEPEST DEPTH 443 

cleavage between Parnell and himself in a way 
which, although studiously friendly, increased still 
more the disquietude in the popular mind : ^ — 

I daresay I will lay myself open to the suspicion of 
differing from Mr. Parnell, and from most of my colleagues 
in the Land League movement. But the fact is, there is 
not a particle more of difference of opinion between the 
member for Cork and myself than there was when we 
first stood together on a public platform in Westport, 
three years ago. Mr. Parnell advocates Peasant Pro- 
prietary. I am in favour of the land becoming the 
national property of Ireland. 

The very important particle of difference was, 
that this time he proceeded to define the " Land for 
the People " and to put the Nationalisation of the 
Land before the country as a rival programme, 
which he worked out in the Liverpool speech in the 
utmost detail." He left Liverpool immediately 

^ United Ireland^ June loth. 

2 The highly ingenious, but painfully impracticable, manner in 
which Mr. Davitt proposed to compensate the landlords, by an 
Irish land tax, "without touching the pockets of the English tax- 
payer," is only of interest now in its bearing upon his extraordinary 
crusade against the Land Conference Settlement of 1903. The 
Purchase Act of 1903 asks the Irish tenants to pay ^100,000,000, 
borrowed from the State at an interest of 2^ per cent, for the 
entire ownership of the land of Ireland, or, including the purchases 
under the Ashbourne and Balfour Acts, ;.£ 120,000,000 in all, Mr. 
Davitt, in his Liverpool speech, proposes that the tenants should pay 
the landlords ^140,000,000 for a limited interest, or ^20,000,000 
more than the tenants' price under the Act of 1903 and its pre- 
decessors for the entire ownership of the soil. And the Act of 1903 
is a much less advantageous one for the tenants than the Land 
Conference Report, which spells " Ichabod " in the eyes of Mr. Davitt. 
Individual purchasers would fare still worse under Mr. Davitt's 
scheme. He estimates the fair purchase price of the landlords' 
interest at " twenty years' purchase of half the present annual rental " 



444 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

afterwards to carry the new campaign into the 
United States. While this formidable movement 
was on foot to change the basis of the movement 
and to make light of the efforts of " the 
Parliamentarians," Parnell and his couple of dozen 
fighting men, disputing the Coercion Bill line by 
line, were open to the taunt of Sir William 
Harcourt, that they were only " a miserable 
minority of the Irish members " ; and, as a matter 
of fact, while Mr. Davitt was on his way to America, 
the entire band were suspended bodily after an 
all-night-and-all-day sitting. In United Ireland I 
strove hard to assuage public uneasiness, by making 
light of the differences between the leaders and 
preaching the Augustinian doctrine of tolerance : 
"In essential things, Unity ; in doubtful things, 
Liberty ; in all things, Charity." The Irish 
members carefully refrained from accentuating the 
difficulties. They assured the country that, in Mr. 

— that is to say, 50 per cent off the rents as they stood unreduced 
before the Act of 1881. Under the Purchase Act of 1903 (pale a 
version as it is of the Land Conference recommendations) the 
purchase price which I counselled the Irish tenants to be a fair 
average, and against which Mr. Davitt and his friends have warred 
in almost speechless indignation, was only i%\ years' purchase of 
first-term rents — that is to say, of rents already reduced by 20 per 
cent below those for which Mr. Davitt asked the tenants to pay 20 
years' purchase ; and 22 to 23 years' purchase of second-term rents 
— that is to say, of rents reduced by 20 per cent for the first term 
and by 22 per cent more for the second term below the original 
unreduced rental for which Mr. Davit*- asked the tenants to pay 20 
years' purchase. And to pay it, too, not to become proprietors, as 
under the Act of 1903, but to acquire some problematical lease of 
land, which would be the property not of the farmers, but of the 
community in general. 



XVII, THE DEEPEST DEPTH 445 

Sexton's phrase, " The Irish Party was as solid as 
the trunk of an oak." Parnell himself, above all, 
treated the new departure and its author with a 
personal indulgence and an assiduous patience all 
his own. It was only in very strict intimacy he 
dropped one or two aigj'e-doux observations, like 
this (in reference to the Liverpool speech) : "If I 
were Davitt, I should never define. The moment 
he becomes intelligible, he is lost." Nobody 
suffered contradiction more equably from a man of 
Mr. Davitt's fine character, so long as it dealt with 
controversies " in the air." Suffering is the most 
powerful of all arguments with the Irish people ; and 
what an Irish audience saw and loved in Mr, Davitt 
was not his theories, but the nine years' penal 
servitude of the man, who, in his Manchester 
speech, could speak of himself, with a pathos that 
went straight to the Irish heart, as "the son of an 
Irish peasant, who was refused the shelter of an 
Irish workhouse by Irish Landlordism ; the son of 
an Irish mother, who had to beg through the streets 
of England for bread for me." Parnell spoke with, 
and at that time genuinely felt, a personal tender- 
ness for that captivating simplicity and loftiness 
of purpose in Mr. Davitt's character which were 
the all -sufficing atonement for his restiveness at 
awkward moments. Even in the warning he felt 
it necessary to address to the people of the United 
States against the dangers of the new campaign, 
he couched it in terms so cordial, that Mr. 



446 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Davitt triumphantly quoted it in America as proof 
that there was no real difference between them. 

" I believe," he said, in an interview with the New 
York Herald, " that Mr. Davitt is simply desirous of 
testing public opinion in Ireland with regard to this 
matter, and when he finds, as I believe he will find, that 
a large majority of his own people are not inclined to 
depart from the old lines, he, with that public spirit, 
integrity, and desire for union which have so distinguished 
his career, will see that the interests of Ireland can best be 
served by working out the results to which we have been 
devoting our energies since the beginning of the movement." 

Mr. Davitt was amazed to find, on his arrival 
in America, that his Manchester and Liverpool 
speeches, with their enunciation of a new and un- 
authorised programme, and their scarcely veiled 
thrusts at the policy of the Kilmainham Treaty and 
of the Parliamentary Party, had created a general 
disquiet, which his enemies had not been slow to 
translate into the coarsest and most unjust imputa- 
tions of wilful dissension and treachery to Parnell. 
To these brutalities he responded with an excusable 
heat, crying out, at the meeting in the New York 
Academy of Music — after defending his right to 
hold his own opinions, while indignantly denying 
that there was or could be " any rivalry or jealousy 
between him and Mr. Parnell, the head of the move- 
ment, inside Parliament and outside it " ^ — " If these 

1 His way of disposing of the suspicion that he was disputing the 
leadership with Mr. Parnell was a singular one on the part of a 
Democrat. He argued "the thing is impossible, because Mr. 
Parnell is an aristocrat and I am the son of an Irish peasant." 



THE DEEPEST DEPTH 447 

answers are not enough, I shall make no more. If 
I am to be branded as a felon by the English 
Government for my utterances, and denounced by 
the Irish for them, I shall resign, I shall leave a 
party so ungrateful. I owe nothing to the Land 
League. The Land League is in debt to me. If 
traitors and slanderers are to be permitted to hound 
me in this way, I shall consult my own interests 
and retire from the fight." This, however, his 
countrymen found with relief was only the ebullition 
of a pardonably angry hour. To a New York 
Herald interviewer, who brusquely put it to him — 
"Not a few thoughtful men, Mr. Davitt, fancy that 
this new departure of yours is ill-timed. They do 
not take kindly to the doctrine of the Nationalisation 
of the Land," he replied with the most explicit 
assurance that " this particular scheme of land 
reform was not intended by me as an opposite 
scheme to any that might be entertained by Mr. 
Parnell " ; and when asked, " Will you preach this 
doctrine of the Nationalisation of the Land during 
your stay in this country ? " put an end to all 
uneasiness by the reply, " Only incidentally. It is 
not a hobby of mine by any means." The 
Manchester and Liverpool programme was, in fact, 
never pushed further. Mr. George, who rather 
uncivilly remarked that "The Irish burn like chips, 
the English burn like coal," soon returned to 
America, having failed to strike a spark even out 
of his admired English coalfields. 



448 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

Meanwhile the landlord minority were availing 
themselves of the Phoenix Park reaction to carry out 
their eviction schemes with more ferocity than ever, 
and every vestige of public liberty was suppressed 
in order to make straight their paths. Although 
the No-Rent Manifesto was now definitely with- 
drawn — nay, shame to say, because it was withdrawn 
— the eviction campaign recommenced on such a 
scale that, during the debates on the Coercion Bill, 
Gladstone was constrained to say that Parnell " was 
accurate " in saying that " close upon a thousand Irish 
families per week were now being exterminated." 
He acquiesced in the confession wrung from the 
new Chief Secretary, Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, 
that "the very magistrates and police in many 
instances describe the evictions as cases of hard- 
ship," and in his indignant declaration that many 
of the landlords were " insisting on asserting their 
rights in a cruel and unpatriotic manner." It is quite 
true that the Landlord Invincibles were putting the 
screw upon the Government as ruthlessly as those 
of the Phoenix Park did upon Parnell. " Oh for one 
hour of Cromwell ! " was the cry of the principal land- 
lord organ. . Here is how the Evening Mail treated 
the Chief Secretary's humane remonstrance against 
the brutal selfishness of the exterminators : — 

The cowardly and crime-inciting language of the Chief 
Secretary for Ireland in regard to the conduct of Irish 
landlords is, as we anticipated it would, bearing fruit. 
No unpatriotic and cruel landlord has yet, it is true, fallen 



THE DEEPEST DEPTH 449 

a victim to the rifle which Mr. Trevelyan so efficiently- 
assisted to charge. The mischief, however, was done 
when the gun was loaded, etc. 

Far from repenting of the "cruel and unpatriotic" 
conduct which had excited the new Chief Secretary's 
disgust, a syndicate of wealthy landowners, with a 
capital of several millions, under the title of the 
Land Corporation, was formed to extend and 
organise these inhuman proceedings under the 
shelter of the new Coercion regime. The language 
of the prospectus of the Land Corporation made no 
disguise of the object. It was to " disinfect " districts 
touched by the Land League contagion, to " clear 
them of their Land League inhabitants," and to 
" plant them with loyal tenants from other countries " 
— in a word, to challenge and force the Irish people 
into what their principal organ in the Press de- 
scribed as " a war to the death," 

The Land Corporation found their most efficient 

accomplices in a horde of law officers, scrambling 

for the ;^ 1 20,000 a year to which the vote for law 

charges and prosecutions now rose, and in the band 

of half-crazy ex- Indian officers — who were at one 

hour of the day Judges with a boundless summary 

jurisdiction, and the next hour heading police charges 

or giving the word for a volley of buckshot — to whom 

the local preservation of the peace was entrusted. 

The result was that the unfortunate Chief Secretary, 

who shrank, with all the sensitiveness of a peculiarly 

sensitive soul, from the cruelty and unpatriotic 

2 G 



450 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

selfishness of the exterminators and their Castle 
abettors, nevertheless found himself their helpless 
instrument in inaugurating a White Terror which 
was to bring years of misery and remorse upon him- 
self and upon Earl Spencer, his Lord- Lieutenant 
— a man of no less delicate honour and of firmer 
texture. The pretext was " restoring public respect 
for law and order " ; the real purpose was a campaign 
of landlord vengeance for Gladstone's Land Act — 
" to put a stop to the blackmail of unreasonable 
abatements " was the Land Corporation's way of 
putting it — conducted under the aegis of Gladstone's 
lieutenants, with the help of all the legal rabblement 
who flourish by Irish disturbance. To keep up 
in England the notion of a country seething with 
crime, Scotland Yard was induced to delegate two 
of its Criminal Investigation Inspectors to guard 
the Prime Minister. The cellars of the Cork 
Court-house were searched the day before the 
Summer Assizes as for a new Gunpowder Plot. 
Even Cardinal M'Cabe was put under the indignity 
of police protection at his house in Dublin, owing, 
as it was pretended, to his outspoken denuncia- 
tions of the Phoenix Park murders, until an in- 
dignant protest from His Eminence caused the 
cessation of the outrage. The jails were visited in 
the search for informers by the aid of threats and 
bribes ; vast sums were offered as police rewards 
for the discovery of old crimes, or, as is now 
perfectly certain, for the organisation of new ones. 



XVIII THE DEEPEST DEPTH 451 

The ground thus prepared, the Summer Assizes were 
turned into a shambles where bands of prisoners, 
many guihy and many (the Crown officials them- 
selves now confess) innocent, were brought before 
tribunals packed at any risk, hit or miss, to furnish the 
gallows with victims, in order to expiate the murders 
of the previous years. The original design of the 
Coercion Act — to entrust the trials to a tribunal of 
three Judges without a jury — came to nought, owing 
to the resistance of the Judges themselves, one of 
whom. Baron Fitzgerald, a man of austere con- 
stitutional temper, resigned his place on the Bench 
rather than stoop to the function, and another of 
whom, of a coarser breed. Chief Justice Morris, 
responded, " I'm damned if I'll turn hangman !" 

The Three -Judge device would, at least, have 
saved us from the more indecent machinery of jury- 
packing, on which the Crown was obliged to fall 
back for its verdicts. The spirit in which this foul 
practice was approached was graphically expressed 
by the Daily Telegraph in its declaration: "We 
must, to convict murderers, secure, by hook or crook, 
by law or challenge, metropolitan, Protestant, and 
loyal juries " — the murderers being any peasants who 
were put in the dock under any cloud of reasonable 
suspicion as murderers. One of the first victims 
" by hook or crook " was a youth of excellent family 
in the county of Clare, Francis Hynes, who was 
charged with shooting an old man named Doloughty, 
on the public road, without any agrarian motive 



452 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

that the Crown could suggest. A shot that had 
reached the brain left the old man barely able to 
mumble out a few words, so disconnected that the 
priest did not feel justified in administering the 
Last Sacraments. The whole case against the 
prisoner turned upon the evidence of a Resident 
Magistrate, who saw the dying man after the priest, 
and stated that he heard him utter the name of 
" Francey Hynes" as his last words. Out of a 
panel of thirty -eight jurors, the Crown ordered 
twenty-six Catholic jurors to "stand aside," and a 
" metropolitan, Protestant, and loyal " jury was thus 
duly empanelled, its foreman being a Captain 
Hamilton, the Secretary of the Land Corporation, 
who had just entered on their campaign to "clear 
infected districts of their Land League inhabitants, 
and to plant them with loyal tenants from other 
countries." On the first night of the trial, the jury 
were accommodated for the night at the Imperial 
Hotel, in which I had become a lodger since my 
release from Kilmainham. I was awakened in the 
middle of the night by an uproar in the corridor 
outside my bedroom. The door was thrust in, and 
a man with a candle in his hand staggered into the 
room at the head of two or three companions, 
equally drunk and boisterous. I jumped out of 
bed with some words of anger. The revellers 
precipitately retreated. I rang for the night porter, 
who told me that the disturbers were members of 
the Hynes jury, and that they had been going 



THE DEEPEST DEPTH 453 

riotously through the house, demanding drink, and 
endeavouring to break into the bedroom of a lady 
lodger on the opposite side of the corridor. The 
next morning I thought it my duty to relate, in a 
letter to the Freeman, my experience of how the 
Hynes jury had passed the night, while a human 
life was hanging on their word. Either the jurors 
or their accuser had behaved scandalously. To put 
the accuser on proof of his allegations would seem to 
have been the first duty of an Executive sensitive 
for the fair repute of public justice. It afterwards 
turned out that the Crown Solicitor, Mr. Morphy, 
did actually go to the Imperial Hotel to inquire 
into my allegations, and found himself face to face 
with overwhelming testimony of their truth. No 
less than eleven witnesses stated then, what they 
subsequently swore, and what, indeed, the foreman, 
Captain Hamilton, subsequently confessed, that a 
group of the jurors spent the night drinking with 
strangers in the public billiard- room, and that at 
least one of them was "calling loudly," "making 
more noise than was absolutely necessary," and pay- 
inof nocturnal visits to the bedrooms. The billiard- 
marker mentioned the names of no less than four 
persons, not members of the jury, who were drink- 
ing whiskey and champagne with the jurors, and 
participating in the midnight disorders. The lady 
lodger. Miss Carbery, sister of one of the most 
distinguished members of the Jesuit order, thus 
describes the scene in her affidavit. 



454 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Several persons were taking part in the disturbance. 
They came to my door several times and turned the 
handle. They kicked at the door again and again. I 
thought they would smash the fanlight over the door by 
knocking at it with their knuckles. Only that my door 
was locked, I believe that they would have forced it in. 
From their boisterous conduct I believe that they must 
have been under the influence of drink. When I read 
Mr. O'Brien's letter I thought he described their conduct 
very mildly. The disturbance continued from about 1 2 
to 12.30 o'clock. 

Appalled by the evidence thus thrust upon him, 
the Crown Solicitor — far from sifting its truth by a 
public inquiry — made up his mind to make inquiry 
impossible by proceeding for " contempt of court " 
not against the writer of the letter, but against 
Mr. Gray, M.P., for publishing it. By one of the 
startling contrasts of Irish life, Gray v^ras High 
Sheriff of the court before which he was now 
summoned to answer. He faced his responsibilities 
with a superb courage, and justified himself in a 
speech which made even the ranks of Tuscany hang 
their heads in admiring meanness. But to listen 
to argument, much less to admit evidence, was the 
last thought of a tribunal specially constructed to 
strike terror and to "convict by hook or crook." 
When the proceedings commenced, I stood up in 
court and announced myself as the writer of the 
letter, and claimed some opportunity of establishing 
its truth by public evidence. The Judge flew at 
me with the judicial temper of a wild cat. I was 



THE DEEPEST DEPTH 455 

instantly hurled out of court. Gray's speech was 
of no avail, except to aggravate the penalty. The 
choleric Judge Lawson, who presided, answered 
him with a harangue of browbeating insolence, 
declaring the accusation against the jury, upon the 
investigation of which he shut the door, and the 
substantial truth of which the foreman of the jury 
subsequently admitted, to be a " thorough invention." 
Justice was vindicated by sending the High Sheriff 
to prison for three months, and inflicting a fine of 
;^500 upon his newspaper. Every public cry for 
investigation was stifled with the mailed fist ; 
Francey Hynes was duly convicted and hanged ; 
and one of the Crown Counsel of the day. The 
MacDermot, who was the Attorney-General of a 
later administration, confessed to me sixteen years 
afterwards that subsequent inquiry had convinced 
him that a judicial error had been committed, 
and that it was a relative of Francey Hynes, 
and not Francey Hynes, who had committed the 
murder. 

From the Court-house at Green Street, where 
Gray had just been sentenced, I walked over to the 
City Hall, to see the Freedom of the City conferred 
on Messrs. Parnell and Dillon. Mr. Dillon had 
spoken only once in Ireland since the Kilmainham 
Treaty, and uneasy rumours of his retirement from 
public life were continuously circulating. It was 
with a profound sense of relief that the Irish people 
saw him take his stand by the Chief in this hour of 



456 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

extremity. Whatever his differences with Parnell 
on other matters, his knowledge of the practical 
needs of Irish life had saved him from being smitten 
at any time with the theories of Mr. George, while 
his intensity of conviction, his effectiveness on the 
field of action, and the gentle charm of character he 
concealed under a cold exterior and a remorseless- 
ness of language, constituted him a unique figure 
among the National forces of his time. The scene 
in the City Hall, following in an hour or two the 
orgy of triumphant tyranny in the Green Street 
Court-house, threw a strange light upon the gulf 
that had again opened between Ireland and her 
rulers. The irrepressible force of the Irish Cause 
was attested by the mere fact that the Freedom of 
the City, which was refused a few months previously 
by the casting vote of one Lord Mayor, was now 
presented by a new and Nationalist Lord Mayor, 
speaking for a Nationalist majority, purified and 
replenished. For all that, the celebration marked 
perhaps the lowest point of depression to which the 
popular movement was sunk by the Phoenix Park 
reaction. Parnell, in his speech, confessed plainly 
that public life in Ireland was rendered impossible 
for the three years during which the new Coercion 
Act was to last. To speak, to write, or to combine, 
no matter how guardedly, to be seen abroad after 
dark, to object to the irruption of a policeman into 
one's bedroom at any hour of the night, was to run 
the risk of fine and imprisonment without trial, or 



THE DEEPEST DEPTH 457 

by a form of trial fouler than none. Their Castle 
lawyers and police pro -consuls had managed to 
persuade Earl Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan that 
examples had to be made and blood avenged by 
blood, if society was to be saved ; and they were to 
learn, by the experience of three hideous years, that 
they were dealt with as marionettes by the sub- 
ordinates of whom they supposed themselves to be 
the masters. 

It was not that Parnell was in the least 
deflected from his purpose, but that matters 
had come to such a point that he had no better 
message than that of the beaten Italian after 
Villafranca, "Brothers, we must wait!" On the 
same evening there was a long consultation at 
Morrison's Hotel with a number of the recently 
released suspects, who had come up from every 
part of the country for the celebration at the City 
Hall. One of the party was Mr. Tim Harrington, 
whose stubborn courage and masterful energy at 
the head of the organisation in Kerry had long 
marked him out for the larger part he was hence- 
forth to play on the Nationalist dtat-viajor. Another 
was the already grey-headed Matt Harris, of Bal- 
linasloe, who combined the solemnity of a judge with 
the juvenile devil-may-careishness of a volunteer for 
a forlorn hope. It was a rather dismal exchange of 
confidences as to the collapse of the people's organis- 
ation, the unbridled insults of their local tyrants, and 
their own deep discouragement, all leading up to 



458 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the conclusion that "something must be done" — 
nobody specified exactly what. Parnell listened, 
as was his wont, until everybody had put in 
his plaint. Then he delivered himself of this 
remarkable judgment : " I see nothing for it ex- 
cept to ' duck ' for these three years, and then — 
ah — resume." 

There was a general murmur from us jeunes 
moustaches, as well as from the vieille barbe of Bal- 
linasloe. It would be ruin, demoralisation, disgrace ; 
better fill the jails again than that. Whereupon 
Parnell, with his pretty smile, spoke his fiery 
young barbarians thus : " My dear Harrington, 
I don't intend to go to jail again myself, but 
I have not the least objection that anybody else 
should go." 

When our friends from the country had departed, 
unsubdued but not in very cheerful spirits, Parnell 
and myself sat together far into the night in his 
room, and had some serious conversation. I told 
him I did not in the least misapprehend his jocular 
hint as to the policy of the future ; that having cut 
Slander's head off by going to jail once, and trying 
the No- Rent policy fairly out, I quite agreed that 
a second imprisonment for him would be an 
anti- climax, which could have no effect except a 
depressing one, and that all the world would know 
it was not the pusillanimity of a timid commander, 
but the wisdom of a prudent one, that left men in 
a less responsible situation to expose themselves 



xviii THE DEEPEST DEPTH 459 

in the line of fire. All I wanted was to be sure 
that those who might advance to the line of fire 
and draw the fire would not be contravening any 
policy he might deem more effective with an eye 
to the future ; for, should it be otherwise, nothing 
would induce me either to advance one step without 
his sanction or, on the other hand, to depart an 
inch from the lines on which United Ireland had 
been started, so long as I remained responsible for 
its management. The time was come for telling 
him — I am afraid at what must have seemed a 
presumptuous length in a comparative novice — that 
I did not attach a fig's worth of importance to the 
criticisms on the Kilmainham Treaty — that it was, 
in my poor judgment, the most amazing success 
an imprisoned Irish leader, in a particularly tight 
corner, had ever won over a conquering English 
Government ; and better than a success of strategy, 
a success of statesmanship ; — that if Gladstone's side 
of the bargain had been carried out in the spirit in 
which he first announced it to the House of Com- 
mons, Parnell would have no more enthusiastic ally 
than I in insisting that no obstacle must be presented 
from the Irish side, but that the country, after its 
tremendous effort, and with its forces in better heart 
than ever, should be allowed gradually to broaden 
down into a friendlier and more conciliatory spirit, 
in which the reorganisation of the Irish Govern- 
ment foreshadowed by the Prime Minister would 
fatally culminate in Home Rule ; — but that the 



46o WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

Phoenix Park murders, and the savage spirit of 
reprisals they had roused among the dominant 
classes in England and Ireland, had changed all 
that ; that all the devils had been let loose again 
between the two nations ; that even Gladstone and 
his Government, in going back to Forster's methods 
and allowing themselves to be whirled along in the 
blind rush of English prejudices, at the cry of a 
brutally selfish landlord minority, left the country, 
which he treated as a nation of bloodthirsty 
Invincibles, no alternative but to strike back or 
go under ; that to silently acquiesce in such a 
wrong would be to leave the administration of the 
Land Act wholly at the landlords' mercy, to abandon 
the field to the secret societies, and, in fact, leave 
the Invincibles the depositories of the duty of 
Irish resistance. Finally, that if defiance, open, 
systematic, and remorseless, of the new Coercion 
regime in any way contravened his own plans for 
the future, he had only to say the word and no act 
of mine should ever be found in conflict with his 
judgment ; but that he would easily understand that 
United Ireland, if it was to be conducted in a more 
pacific spirit, would have to be conducted by other 
hands than mine. 

The reply was reassuring and decisive. " My 
dear O'Brien," he said, " you have scarcely said a 
word in which you and I are not at one. When 
have you found me to presume to meddle in the 
management of United Ireland} Depend upon 



XVIII THE DEEPEST DEPTH 461 

it, you never shall. Of course, somebody's got to 
break these animals' jaws," he said, in one of those 
rushing sentences that had the swish of a storm as 
they broke through his teeth ; and then he added 
some affectionate words about his anxiety lest I 
should be swept away as ruthlessly as John Mitchel 
was, placing his hand upon my shoulder with a gentle 
pressure, which was the utmost stretch of personal 
tenderness I ever saw him exhibit. But he was 
clear that he himself had to move with the utmost 
circumspection, if even any skeleton of popular 
organisation was to be kept standing. It was after 
a long hesitation he consented to summon a meeting 
in the Dublin Mansion House for the purpose of 
inaugurating a Fund for the Evicted Tenants. In 
the requisition which I drafted at his request for 
the purpose, we based ourselves carefully upon the 
provocative action of the Land Corporation Com- 
pany in launching a movement "which will possibly 
involve the eviction of a considerable number of the 
Irish people whom recent legislation does not pro- 
tect " ; and it was even thought necessary to declare 
that " the movement which is now proposed for the 
relief of evicted families will not be of a political 
character." When, after this tentative step had 
been successfully taken, during the summer, a 
National Convention was at last summoned for 
October to re-establish the popular organisation 
under the title of " The National League," the 
word " Convention " was deliberately dropped and 



462 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the modest term "Conference" substituted for the 
gathering. National dejection had ebbed so low, 
and the White Terrorists of the Castle had become 
so bold in daring anything against popular liberty, 
that on the day before the Conference was to 
assemble, it was still doubtful whether that even- 
ing's Dublin Gazette would not contain a proclama- 
tion forbidding it. 

Before things got even thus far, Parnell had to 
execute one of the most delicate coups of his life in 
regulating accounts with the Ladies' Land League. 
The ladies had themselves displayed so intrepid 
a spirit in the No- Rent struggle, that they were 
naturally among the severest critics of the Kil- 
mainham Treaty, and formed and expressed judg- 
ments more incisive than complimentary as to the 
more unheroic calculations of "the men." They 
were, besides (and it was the point that impressed 
Parnell most), the administrators of the Land 
League funds, and were distributing them at a 
rate which alarmed that most prudent of Chan- 
cellors of the Exchequer. Shortly after their 
release from Kilmainham, he and Mr. Dillon paid 
a visit to the Ladies' Land League Offices, to dis- 
cuss the financial situation. By a delicious trait of 
feminine "colour," the young ladies, who, unsalaried 
and to a great extent unthanked, spent their days 
and evenings laboriously immersed in the books 
and accounts of the League, constantly liable to 
prosecutions, police assaults, and admonitions more 



XVIII THE DEEPEST DEPTH 463 

cruel still from eminent personages of their own 
household, had introduced into the League Office 
a piano, with which they sometimes beguiled the 
tedium of their work. As the two ex-Kilmainham 
prisoners mounted the stairs, the young ladies 
grouped themselves around the piano, and hailed 
the leaders with the gentle, if somewhat sarcastic 
strains of " Twenty love-sick maidens we," from a 
comic opera of Sullivan's, which was at the time 
all the rage. Parnell smiled, and softly came to 
business. In his sister. Miss Anna Parnell, who was 
the soul of the League, he found his own tenacity 
of purpose, with very nearly all his own genius for 
command. The ladies held out stoutly against his 
parsimonious counsels. He had his cruel masculine 
revenge. He quietly walked across, after his inter- 
view with the ladies, and cut off their account at the 
Hibernian Bank. Deeply though she loved her 
brother, I don't think Miss Parnell ever saw him 
again during his life. The Ladies' League took 
advantage of the formation of the new National 
League to dissolve their own Association. They 
were as truly heroic a band of women as ever a 
country had the happiness to possess in an hour of 
stress. They unquestionably deserve the largest 
share of credit for breaking Mr. Forster's power in a 
winter when even pretty resolute men's hearts beat 
low. Nobody appreciated more truly than Parnell 
their daring and unselfishness. It was his financial 
soul alone that saw any defect in their operations. 



464 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xvm 

In the lean years that he knew were coming, it 
was always with a chuckle he recalled that he had 
" managed to save a nest-egg in the Paris Funds," 
and to his foresight in removing the League Funds 
out of the grip of English attachments, and hus- 
banding a considerable reserve of them for the 
future, is incontestably due the impregnability of 
his movement. 



CHAPTER XIX 



THE NATIONAL LEAGUE 



The eve of the National Conference was signalised 
by perhaps the heaviest blow of all for those who 
were endeavouring to piece the shattered National 
forces together. Mr. Dillon's resignation of his 
seat for Tipperary, and withdrawal from public life, 
long apprehended, was now publicly announced. 
His health, had been deeply undermined, and in 
retiring for a long residence on a ranch in Colorado, 
he took care to minimise by his personal friendli- 
ness towards Parnell the discouraging effect of his 
disappearance. We strove to reassure the country 
by declaring in United Ireland that — 

We have the very best authority for announcing that 
there is not the slightest foundation for the statements, 
in the English and the Irish Tory newspapers, that Mr. 
Dillon's resignation is attributable to any difference of 
opinion with Mr. Parnell. On the contrary, we are aware 
that about a week before Mr. Dillon published his letter 
to the people of Tipperary, he, with Mr. Davitt and Mr. 
Brennan, had a conference with Mr. Parnell at Avondale, 

465 2 H 



466 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

at which a cordial agreement was come to at all points as 
to the future policy of the National Party. Mr. Dillon's 
resignation is occasioned solely by the condition of his 
health.^ 

Nevertheless, the disappearance of a leader so 
trusted and beloved at such an hour caused an 
instinctive shudder to run through the Irish 
people's dejected ranks. No number of assur- 
ances could allay the disquiet caused by his 
absence from the Antient Concert Room on the 
eventful day. When the Conference assembled, 
it was made only too plain that the preliminary 
accord established at Avondale was a fraofile one. 
Parnell was only freed from his apprehension that 
the Conference would be suppressed 77tanu militariy 
to find himself face to face with a more violent out- 
break than ever of the old quarrel between the 
Land Nationalisers and the Parliamentary Party. 
Mr. Davitt attended the Conference with a con- 
siderable following, principally from the North, who 
made up by their fervour for their weakness in 
numbers. The assembly was early interpenetrated 
with that electric excitement which, in the first 
deliberative essays of all countries, and of Ireland in 
particular, so often tends to the forgetfulness of 
great issues in the heat of personal emotions. Mr. 
Davitt's general attitude at the time was that of a 
pessimist, who confessed to "an ugly feeling arising 
from the contemplation how little has resulted from 

1 United Ireland, September 30, 1882. 



THE NATIONAL LEAGUE 467 

the great agitation which has been carried on for 
three or four years. ... In fact, a mountain of 
agitation has only brought forth a mouse of a Land 
measure." But he did not at the National 
Conference renew the somewhat acrid criticisms 
of his speech of the previous Sunday in Wexford. 
The speech of Parnell himself was of a sternly 
business-like character. He spoke under a deep 
sense that it was not a time for oratorical efferves- 
cence, and yet with the tranquil assurance of a man 
who, even in the midst of a tempest of coercion, was 
laying the foundations of a movement that would 
build up every department of the National Life 
— agrarian, industrial, and political. Mr. Davitt's 
speech on the general programme enunciated 
by Parnell only occupied a few minutes. He 
declared that " in claiming the right to advocate 
my own principles, I am in no way in antagonism 
with Mr, Parnell or his policy " ; and announced 
that, as part of the understanding come to between 
Mr. Dillon, Mr. Brennan, and himself and Mr. 
Parnell at Avondale, as to the action he should 
take at the Conference : "I agreed that, while I 
could not conscientiously advocate the principle 
underlying his platform on the Land question, I 
would not divide this Conference or raise any 
discussion with his plan of settlement." ^ 

1 In view of the onslaughts made upon the terms of Land 
Purchase agreed to by the Land Conference of 1903, it is interesting 
to read the far more modest demands put forward by Parnell as 
comprehending a satisfactory settlement of the Land question. 



468 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

That kind of nervous applause which sounds like 
a great sigh of relief broke from the Conference. 
It was upon the subsidiary question of the constitu- 
tion of the National Council for the government of 
the new League that the storm burst. The issue 
was so little practical that the Council, which nearly 
wrecked the Conference in a dispute as to its 
constitution, was, as a matter of fact, never formed. 
The official proposal was that the new League was 
to be governed by a council of thirty, of whom a 
third were to be selected by the Parliamentary 
Party. Mr. Davitt and his friends pressed, by way 
of amendment, that each of the thirty-two counties 
should elect a representative apiece — a Member of 
Parliament, if they saw fit — but that the Parlia- 
mentary Party should have no special representa- 
tion of their own. The amendment instantly kindled 

Replying to a demand of Mr. Mat Harris for compulsory purchase, 
and his objection to the extension of the period of purchase from 
35 years to 63 years (only 5 years less than the 68 years of the 
Wynd lam Act), he explained that under the system of purchase he 
proposed, the tenants would pay 20 years' purchase of first judicial 
rents upon terms that would reduce their annual payments by 25 per 
cent for 63 years, after which their payments would cease ; and he 
added • " The system that we propose is one which is so mutually 
advantageous both to the tenant and to the landlord, that if we could 
get the Legislature to accept it, I confidently believe that it would 
not be necessary to put compulsion upon the landlords to sell, or to 
adopt the principle of compulsory purchase ; so therefore, I say, let 
us wait and see whether the landlords will sell voluntarily under the 
amended system that we propose." Under the Land Conference 
recommendations the tenant would receive a reduction not of 25 per 
cent, but of 40 per cent, for practically the same term, while the 
landlord would receive (and not at the tenant's expense) a bonus of 
5 years' purchase — a crowning inducement to sell which Parnell had 
not dared to suggest to the Legislature of that day. 



THE NATIONAL LEAGUE 469 

two dangerous passions — a conflict between North 
and South — since it was pointed out that the effect 
would be to give a few Branches in Down or 
Antrim the same power as three or four hundred 
Branches in Cork or Tipperary — and the question 
of confidence or no confidence in the Parhament- 
ary Party. Mr. Davitt vehemently insisted upon 
the democratic principle of direct election by the 
people.^ He found himself once more compelled 
to protest his loyalty to Mr. Parnell, and "hurled 
back in Mr. O'Connor's teeth" the imputation that 
his proposal covered any vote of censure on the 
Parliamentarians ; but Mr. T. P. O'Connor, in one 
of those speeches which only save a country from a 
crisis by seeming to precipitate it, pointed out that, 
while "he could not see into Mr. Davitt's bosom," 
the practical result of his amendment would be 
either to flood the Council with Members of Parlia- 
ment, and so exclude local men of worth, or to 

1 The democratic principles of direct election and complete self- 
government in every Parliamentary Division of the country were 
established by the constitution of the United Irish League with a 
fulness Mr. Davitt had not dared to contemplate in his proposals of 
October 1882. The only undemocratic clause of the constitution of 
the United Irish League (inserted sorely against the will of its 
draughtsman) is one admitting ten non-elected but co-opted men and 
six non-elected but co-opted officials to a practically predominant 
■power in the governing body of the League. It is one of life's little 
ironies, that Mr. Davitt and Mr. Dillon should be two of the non- 
elected, co-opted members of the Directory of the United Irish League, 
in contradiction to the democratic principles so vehemently contended 
for twenty years before, and should have thought themselves justified, 
in that capacity, in "launching a determined campaign" against the 
Policy of Conciliation unanimously adopted by the elected members 
of that body. 



470 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

expose the Parliamentary Party, who had the 
heaviest responsibility on the field of fight, to the 
possibility of being obliged to support some policy 
they knew to be pernicious, at the dictation of a 
body on which they would have no representation. 
The speech, and Mr. Davitt's angry interruptions, 
raised the temper of the assembly to a point at 
which even Parnell's serenity found some difficulty 
in keeping it from boiling over ; but the danger, 
when at its worst, was put an end to by an 
unlooked-for and peculiarly Irish denouement : 
Mr. Davitt, to prove the injustice of Mr. O'Connor's 
imputation of hostility to the Parliamentary Party, 
indignantly withdrew his amendment. An Irish 
assembly, ever readier to dwell upon the impulsive 
generosity of an action than upon its strict logical 
causation, cheered with all its soul, and a Confer- 
ence that lasted without a break from a quarter 
to twelve in the forenoon to a quarter to eight 
o'clock in the evening, ended in a general hand- 
shake. 

We all — and nobody so assiduously as Parnell 
— did our best to treat the differences with the 
Land Nationalisers as tenderly as possible, and in 
particular to surround Mr. Davitt's name, and even 
his foibles, with an inviolable respect. He remained 
a member of the Organising Committee, charged 
with propagating the new League, but seldom 
attended, and never, in matter of fact, took any 
systematic interest in the work of the National 



XIX THE NATIONAL LEAGUE 471 

League. Beyond an occasional speech of a general 
character, oftenest in the great towns of Britain, 
and mostly flavoured with a sub-acid criticism of 
whatever active policy happened to be for the 
moment in possession of the field, he took little 
part in the tremendous three years' conflict, 
that changed an administration of remorseless 
Coercionists into convinced Home Rulers. To 
complete the misfortunes of the time, the uneasy 
apprehensions with which events in Ireland had 
been filling the Irish-American mind ended with 
dissensions which paralysed for a time all hope 
from that quarter. As early as May 31st, the 
leaders of the movement in New York had cabled 
to Parnell the following perturbed message : — 

Reported dissension between yourself, Dillon, and 
Davitt most discouraging. Extreme policy deemed 
perilous. United moderate action we are convinced is 
desired by Irish America. (Signed) W. B. Wallace, 
Hugh King, John Rooney, Constantine Maguire, John 
Devoy, Andrew Walsh, John Breslin, John C. Maguire. 

The Mr. John Devoy who was one of the 
signatories was the author of the famous " New 
Departure " letters, which had been, perhaps, the 
most powerful influence in the foundation of the 
Land League, since they signified the fusion of the 
Irish Republican Brotherhood with the Constitu- 
tionalists in its support. He and Mr. Davitt had 
unfortunately drifted apart from friendship to cold- 
ness, and from coldness to bitter antagonism, with 



472 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

results that the friends of both of them, and indeed 
their country, had reason to deplore. Mr. Davitt's 
other friend of renown in the United States, Mr. 
Patrick Forde, of the Irish World, remained 
unalterably attached to his fortunes. To the 
decisions of the National Conference, ignoring the 
doctrines of No- Rent and of Nationalisation of the 
Land in the foundation of the New League, he 
responded by declaring the Land League to be 
dead, and shutting the columns of the Irish World 
to any further appeal for funds for the home 
organisation, which had "abandoned the original 
line of policy." The main body of the League in 
America stood firm, and retorted with vigour upon 
Mr. Forde's pretensions to speak for a population 
which was essentially moderate in its views and 
unshakable in its belief in Parnell's capacity as a 
leader. The net result, however, was that the two con- 
flicting schools for years neutralised one another's 
usefulness in the well-nigh hopeless struggle that 
was being- waged at home. Mr. Forde's powerful 
paper drifted into the organ of a terrorist conspiracy 
which undertook to reply with dynamite in the 
towns of England to the terrorism of the hangings 
and ferocious repression going on in Ireland. And 
it became one of Parnell's new anxieties that, in the 
exasperation caused by the suppression of all public 
liberty in Ireland, the hotter spirits even of the 
Irish- American organisation which remained faith- 
ful, listened more and more to the counsels of 



XIX THE NATIONAL LEAGUE 473 

desperation and mingled in designs whose extent 
and character he could but vaguely conjecture. 

For the two next ensuing years — what between 
Parnell's almost continuous absence in England, 
Mr. Dillon's removal to Colorado, Mr. Davitt's 
inactivity, or activity only in the domain of censure, 
and the restriction of Mr. Sexton's and Mr. T. P. 
O'Connor's superb abilities to the field of Parlia- 
mentary debate — it is the bare truth to say that 
United Ireland had to run the all but exclusive 
risk of keeping the torch of public liberty alight. 
Every number that was issued might have been its 
last. Its one source of safety was the knowledge in 
Dublin Castle of the recklessness of consequences 
on the part of its conductors. It was one illustra- 
tion more of the truth : Una salus victis milla^n 
sperare salutem. The paper only survived the 
prosecution for one seditious libel by replying with 
a dozen fresh ones. To the adventures of a journal 
that had twenty members of its staff at the same 
moment in Her Majesty's prisons, and produced 
clandestine editions in seven cities of England, 
Scotland, and France, it was now to add the trial 
of its editor before "a loyal Protestant jury," em- 
panelled to " convict him by hook or crook " in 
Green Street ; a series of merciless fines for con- 
tempt of court ; and a succession of libel actions 
by high Castle officials, who claimed no less than 
;^ 7 5, 000 damages in all from the paper they had 
failed to intimidate by imprisonment, or by police 



474 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

raids to break up its formes or confiscate its sheets 
in the streets or news -shops. The terror spread 
among the Castle terrorists by our audacity was 
intensified by the knowledge that we were not 
without confederates among the subordinate Crown 
officials in Her Majesty's printing-office, and even 
in the secret police, who enabled us to look into 
the very penetralia of the Castle, and in many vital 
emergencies to confront them with their own inmost 
secrets in remorseless type. 

Mr. Healy, from his first post as the contributor 
of a Parliamentary Letter, had come to be my con- 
stant and most redoubtable auxiliary in these wild 
wars. " Here," he remarked one day to Mr. Justin 
M'Carthy in our room at United Ireland o^o.^, "we 
compose our little salads. O'Brien supplies the oil 
and I pour in the vinegar." He was, indeed, 
throughout these turbulent years one of the most 
fearless of sabreurs and one of the most delightful 
of comrades — pitiless as a public executioner with 
his pen, but ever ready with his mad joke or chirpy 
laugh amidst the smoke of battle. Our writings 
were the lightest portion of our work. He was 
reading in his dogged way for the Bar, amidst the 
crash of worlds, and I had to spend half the week 
supervising, in the smallest particulars, a commer- 
cial business which was to me as hateful as if the 
ledgers were cages of wild beasts, but which, never- 
theless, by some strange freak of destiny, I managed 
to conduct with success under circumstances that 



«x THE NATIONAL LEAGUE 475 

threatened weekly bankruptcy and ruin. As time 
went on, we had also to do the principal part of 
whatever public speech -making was going on, in 
concert with Mr. Harrington, who had now become 
the principal Secretary and strong right arm of the 
National League. His was a gingerly task, for any 
display of energy on the part of the infant League 
might have caused its instant suppression. That, 
under such conditions, he should have managed to 
save the League for better times from the stroke of 
the Castle despots, and at the sam^ time displayed 
the public spirit that consigned him in person to a 
plank bed for three months in Mullingar Jail, is a 
testimony to the mixture of sagacity and stubborn 
courage which is the mainspring of his character. 
For many months he and Mr. Healy and myself 
were accustomed to distribute ourselves every 
Sunday among whatever meagre public meetings 
were to be had. We would leave Dublin by the 
night mail-trains on Saturday night, get in to our 
destination — some place as westerly as Ballina or 
as far south as Tralee — towards three or four 
o'clock, perhaps, of an icy winter's morning, spend 
the day orating to a somewhat cowed little assembly 
— as often as not under a drenching downpour of 
rain — waste the evening in the scarcely more ex- 
hilarating delights of a rustic " banquet," and return 
to Dublin by Sunday's night-mail train, reaching 
Kingsbridge or Broadstone as the day was break- 
ing. On Tuesday we had to turn up again to " fill 



476 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the bill " at the meeting of the Central Branch of 
the National League. 

United Ireland had to go to press on Wednesday 
night, and not infrequently when Mr. Healy and 
I appeared at the office on Wednesday morning, 
we would find Mr. Donnelly, the foreman, awaiting 
us in his shirt -sleeves, like a ruddy spectre, wringing 
his hands and declaring that he had not yet a line 
of "editorial matter" wherewith to face the night's 
publication. Whereupon we would fall to work — 
Mr. Healy at one side of the escritoire and myself 
at the other — and divide up our subjects, and ex- 
change stimulating suggestions, and pursue one 
another page after page in a sort of steeple-chase, 
until the gloom on the faithful Donnelly's face 
relaxed, as he gathered leading articles and para- 
graphs into his net in an ever-increasing mass of 
manuscript — my own undecipherable by any except 
certain initiated compositors, and Mr. Healy's plain 
as a schoolboy's, and — is it my envy that speaks? — 
as ugly. At six o'clock Mr. Donnelly would freely 
give us leave to go to dinner, which we took to- 
gether at my quarters in the " Impayrial Hotel"; 
after which we would return to our seats at the 
escritoire, and write away against one another by 
the hour and by the column, until the abyss of 
twelve or fourteen editorial columns was full to the 
brim. Then Mr. Donnelly would reappear, hotter 
than ever, in his shirt-sleeves, as indignant now at 
the torrent of matter that was pouring in upon him 



THE NATIONAL LEAGUE 477 

as he was in the morning at the thought of the two 
empty editorial pages. But on we wrote, and on, 
cajoling honest Donnelly, threatening him, but, by 
some miracle known only to the composing-room, 
always succeeding in crushing our quart into our 
pint-pot, until at last he would solve the difficulty 
by reappearing no more, and responding to our 
clamour for more space only by the first revolu- 
tions of the printing-machine. The Post Office 
clock was probably by that time chiming two or 
three o'clock, and we would return to the " Im- 
payrial " with the jubilant feeling of duty done ; and 
there, in the little back bar, or porter's room, which 
from the night porter's name came to have an 
almost national celebrity as " Hugh's kitchen," we 
would sit over the bottle of stout which was our 
invariable tipple, and Mr. Healy, who was a born 
night-bird, would proceed to begin the night with 
torchlight processions of wit and bon diablerie which 
would illuminate the room with a brighter light than 
Hugh's candle. So we would often remain until the 
day dawned, and the newspaper boys were heard in 
the street ; whereupon we would read our paper, 
still wet from the press, and speculate whether 
Earl Spencer would reply to this or that leading 
article by suppressing the number, or whether Judge 
Lawson would hale us before his angry wig for some 
gross contempt of his Scroggs-like performances 
at the " Bloody Assize," or how many seditious 
libels or civil libels might be wrapped up in our 



478 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap, xix 

retort upon some almighty police despot. Often 
enough, indeed, before the day was done, there 
arrived the warrant or the solicitor's letter antici- 
pated. If the prospect or the event never prevented 
me from sleeping a dreamless sleep, far into the 
day, on the top corridor of the " Impayrial," the fact 
must not be counted unto me for bravery. The 
recklessness which was my safety at the Castle was 
also the secret of my power to sleep untroubled in 
the midst of anxieties which cannot now at even 
this distance of time be recalled without a shiver. 
There was even an element of gaiety in the danger 
for a lonely man, oppressed with the sorrow and the 
injustices of life, who suddenly found himself in the 
rush of a noble battle for the poor and weak, where 
to fall seemed the easiest of duties, if not, indeed, 
the best of luxuries. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE MALLOW ELECTION 
1882-1883 

In the early summer of 1882 it got noised abroad 
that the Attorney-General, Mr. Johnson — a just but 
dull man, who never loved the House of Commons 
or was loved of it — was about to vacate his seat for 
Mallow for a Judgeship. To my stupefaction, I got 
a letter from Parnell pressing me to stand against 
the Law Adviser to the Castle, Mr. Naish, who was 
to be the official candidate for the vacant seat. 
Stupefaction is the only word I can find to 
describe my mingled feelings of confusion and 
repulsion. If the honour were to be presented to 
me on a silver salver, I am quite sure I should 
have instinctively turned from it with a shudder. 
It had never once occurred to me that my tongue 
could be other than a halting and stumbling instru- 
ment of affliction to myself and others. On the 
only occasion when I had addressed half-a-dozen 
connected sentences to a crowd (in the compulsive 
ardour of the Mitchel struggle long ago in Tip- 

479 



48o WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

perary), the paroxysm was one which I should no 
more have expected or desired to return than if it 
had been an outbreak of somnambuHsm. Whatever 
wistful ambition the extinction of my household had 
left me centred around my pen, and required depths 
of shade and retirement for its wooing. To stand 
before a crowd to be its oracle had for me the 
terrors of standing in the public pillory, with the 
considerable advantage in favour of the man in the 
pillory, that he could not help it, and that he was 
not obliged to say anything. After thirty years of 
all -too-abundant public speaking, I still mount a 
public platform with scarcely less repulsion. It was, 
perhaps, rather sheepishness than modesty ; but 
the feeling was and is unconquerable. There is, 
doubtless, an element of disease, if there is also a 
strong stimulant, in the state of mind which leads a 
public speaker to believe he must ever give the best 
that is in him, and that the best must ever be 
unequal to his task, but I was and am an incurable 
sufferer from that disease. 

Anywhere else, my sense of incapacity for public 
life, my shrinking from the naked eye of publicity, 
would have been grievous enough ; in relation to 
Mallow it amounted to downright terror — terror 
keener than I have felt in any of the numerous 
moments of not inconsiderable physical danger in my 
life. At this time of day, when popular power is 
too supreme to be even questioned in Ireland, it 
would be scarcely possible to give any adequate idea 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 481 

of how audacious, how farcically impossible it then 

seemed that I should succeed in being member for 

Mallow. The whole electorate was less than 200. 

The agrarian motives which stirred great masses of 

county electors were entirely lacking in the small 

boroughs. For generations the seat had been 

trafficked between some local aristocrat and some 

great Castle placeman. Political considerations, 

least of all of the Nationalist school, entered not 

at all into the contest. The current price of votes 

— the number of nominations to Civil Service posts 

likely to be available — the counterplay of all sorts 

of corrupt or intimidatory local influences — alone 

decided the day. At that moment one ex-member 

for Mallow was Lord Chancellor of Ireland ; another 

was about to become a Judge ; the Castle candidate 

now named was to be a future Lord Chancellor. 

All the members for Mallow I could remember 

were either powerful placemen, local magnificoes, or 

English millionaires. So many young Mallow folks 

had found places at the Four Courts that the Rolls 

Court was known as " the Mallow Division of the 

High Court of Justice." Parnell, who had in his 

daring way run a Nationalist candidate against the 

Attorney-General at the General Election of 1880, 

was ignominiously routed. It was unthinkable that, 

where he with his magnificent prestige had failed, 

success should be possible for one who still thought 

of Mallow as he had left it, as a place where friends 

were poor and aristocratic pretensions overwhelming; 

2 I 



482 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

where, if he were still remembered at all, he could 
only be remembered as an awkward, shambling 
schoolboy, whose claim to dispute the destinies 
of Mallow with wealthy placemen and haughty 
feudalists would probably excite more smiles than 
even indignation. 

All this was, of course, quite unintelligible to 
Parnell. " I suppose you will get beaten," he said 
in one of his letters, " but you will get the least bad 
beating of anybody I know." In vain I strove to 
impress upon him that the pen was my only effective 
weapon, that my hatred of publicity was insuperable, 
that my candidature for Mallow was in a special 
manner a humiliating absurdity. In vain I sug- 
gested candidates who, as I then implicitly believed, 
were infinitely more likely to find favour with the 
electors of Mallow than I. He returned to the 
charge with a letter in which, after asking me "to 
reconsider your conclusion not to offer yourself," he 
added : " Nay, more. I would strongly urge upon 
you whether you ought not to do a signal service to 
the National cause by coming forward. Do kindly 
give the matter your best consideration and see if 
you cannot change your mind. It is of the greatest 
importance that we should get men of your stamp 
into the representation, and it would be an enormous 
triumph if we could carry this constituency." And he 
followed it up the next day with a further letter : " I 
urgently press upon you the necessity of reconsider- 
ing the matter, as nobody else can win the place." 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 483 

My candidature for Mallow, like most of the 
principal developments of my fate, was decided 
without any volition of my own — almost in spite 
of me. As on nearly all the critical occasions 
of my life, also, I entered upon the Mallow fight 
unaccompanied and alone. Some brutally candid 
observations of Parnell as to the venality of the 
electors of Mallow, on the occasion of the defeat; 
of his candidate, had made him so unpopular 
that it was thought wisest to keep him as far as 
possible away from the borough, and none of his 
lieutenants were likely to have much weight in a 
contest where whatever slender hopes the most 
sanguine could entertain arose from local and 
personal considerations. That the conquest of 
Mallow should be undertaken by a candidate who 
was as poor in speech as he was in pocket, and who 
would probably break down in his first attempt to 
address the public, was only one other forlorn 
element in an expedition whose desperation was 
now becoming almost its only attraction in my 
eyes. On my way to Mallow I paid a visit to Dr. 
Croke at Thurles. It was too late to consult him. 
Indeed, I knew only too well what would be the 
advice of one who knew Mallow as well as he knew 
his Breviary. But there was something in the hug 
of his burly friendship that rendered even his dis- 
approval inspiriting. As I anticipated, he was very 
angry with those who had forced me into the contest. 
In his purple-edged soutane he walked around and 



484 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

around his garden like a king of the forest in his 
cage, as if trying to walk away from his indignation. 
Then he would come to a sudden stop and repeat : 
" You will be beaten. Parnell ought to know you 
will be beaten." I strove to reassure His Grace by 
suggesting that that was just what made the raid 
most tolerable in my eyes ; that I knew I was 
unfit for the work and hated it ; that probably the 
experiment of my visit would be so overwhelming 
a failure that the affair need go no further ; that 
nobody would be compromised except myself; and 
that in any case there was nothing for it now but to 
go through. He would resume his stride and burst 
out again : " I know the people of Mallow. They're 
the kindest creatures on earth ; they're fit for heaven 
in everything — except politics. Yerra, man, an Irish 
borough would elect Barabbas for thirty pieces of 
silver." I gently intimated that I hoped with all 
my heart they would at least insist on getting their 
pieces in gold from the Castle man. 

"Well, come to your dinner," he said at last, 
having walked me to the brink of desperation. 
The disagreeable subject once dismissed, the Arch- 
bishop, as usual, made his plain dinner-table all the 
evening sparkle like a more genial Attic feast-house 
for his guests. His priests he would always treat 
with the judicious indulgence of a big brother, and 
any intimate friend like myself, whom he would 
iocosely call " the Reverend William," was admitted 
to a familiarity which, I think, never led any dis- 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 485 

criminating person for a moment to forget the 
intrinsic nobleness and seriousness of his character. 
He bubbled over that evening vi^ith stories of his 
episcopal experiences — trivial enough in cold print, 
but delightful in the rich flavour with which he 
narrated them. An ancient parish priest named 
Father Ned Ryan — the last of the old line of Irish 
priests who were walking libraries of classic learn- 
ing, interpreted in the quaintest English — was once 
professor in the Thurles Seminary in its primitive 
days, and was expounding some fine passage to his 
class of Boeotian rustics, when the door opened and 
a donkey solemnly obtruded his long ears. The 
class gladly interrupted their studies to rush to put 
out the intruder. Father Ned shook his head 
mournfully as he watched them over his gold spec- 
tacles resuming their places. " He came unto his 
own," he remarked, " and his own received him not." 
Once, on one of his examinations of the children for 
Confirmation, the Archbishop put to a little girl the 
question from the Catechism : " What is the prepara- 
tion for matrimony .'* " The little one blushed and 
giggled, and put the corner of her bib in her mouth 
by way of answer. The question was repeated. 
"Ah, sure, your lordship knows it yourself," was 
the timid reply. *' Yes, but you must tell me, my 
child. What is the preparation for matrimony } " 
"Well, my lord, a little courting, of course," at last 
came the reluctant answer from amidst a rosery of 
blushes. On the occasion of a Visitation, His Grace 



486 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

was upon one occasion addressing the people in his 
familiar way upon some defect in the parish schools, 
and said he had plenty of sympathy with the diffi- 
culties of the schoolmasters. " I was once a school- 
master myself," he said, alluding to his professorship 
in Carlow College and his presidency of St. Col- 
man's College, Fermoy, "and I never forgot the 
old saying of the Roman satirist, that him whom the 
gods hate they make a schoolmaster," " Begor, 
then, my lord, you got out of it purty well, what- 
ever," he heard one of his audience confidentially 
whisper. And so on, through scores of tales of the 
simple drollery of the old rough, honest times, which 
left not an unlaughing face around the table except 
that of His Grace's monkey, whose solemn, weazened 
visage, red jacket, and unexpected pranks were the 
only terror connected with His Grace's hospitalities. 
I spent the greater part of the night composing 
my speech of the morrow and committing it to 
memory. It sometimes seemed as if I really had 
something to say. But again the written word 
would seem to me as dead as Macaulay's "cold 
boiled veal," and still again it seemed certain I 
would remember never a word of it. But the 
situation was too desperate to leave much room 
for oratorical vanities. In the morning I found the 
Archbishop pacing up and down his garden in 
soutane and biretta, even more miserable than 
myself. He would stop to make some remark as 
to the hopelessness of the outlook, and then stride 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 487 

forward as if to walk down his doubts. Then he 
disappeared, and on his return shoved a cheque for 
^100 into my hand. " And there is as much more 
where that came from," he remarked. I had no 
occasion to avail myself of the Archbishop's gener- 
osity, for, as will be seen hereafter, the election, 
which probably cost the Castle candidate ;^2 5oo, 
cost me rather less than ^5 all told ; but the gift 
and the manner of it gave me one of the sweetest 
memories of my life, and the fact deserves to live as 
a stone in the monument that will yet record the 
greatness of the man. 

As I was starting for the train, his farewell, as I 
knelt to kiss his ring, was : " Well, God bless your 
mother's son." That was the blessing that over- 
threw the Castle power in Mallow : it was " my 
mother's son," and not the son's self, who brought all 
the golden spells of the future Chancellor to nought. 
I am afraid my heart was beating very wildly, some- 
where far down about my boots, as the train rolled 
into the Mallow Station. But the sense of unutter- 
able loneliness in the presence of hopeless odds was 
not to last one moment more. There was a crowd 
and a band at the railway station, and they raised a 
shout which left me no manner of doubt that the 
fight was over before it was well begun. It was 
one of those spontaneous outbursts of local pride 
and love before which all human calculations and 
interests go down ; and I was myself the only 
member of my family who counted for absolutely 



488 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

nothing in the result. ** My mother's son " counted 
for most of all ; but " my father's son " was only less 
potent with many a grateful follower of his advice ; 
my elder brother, Jim, with his old Fenian daring 
and adventurous spirit, was the force that stirred 
the young men to their heart of hearts ; the school 
friends of my sister gave me much of that friendship 
of the women, young and old, which bore down all 
temptations of the old electoral Adam in the men ; 
even the fishing and hunting comrades of my young 
brother Dick played their part in the triumph, while 
the verdict that I was " a good son " was the only 
element personal to myself in a struggle which 
revolutionised the Parliamentary representation of 
Ireland. 

Our progress through the town was to me as 
bewildering an experience as if the ground had 
opened and admitted me to fairyland. When we 
got to our own old poverty-stricken suburb of 
Ballydaheen, especially, the enthusiasm of old and 
young — above and beyond all, of the old women, 
and, in a shyer and still more delightful way, of 
their daughters — made it difficult for me to believe 
my eyes and ears. The most amazing thing of all 
was that in a borough where, as indeed in every 
other borough, electoral corruption was the estab- 
lished law, the first and last person who put in a 
petition for money was a poor old creature, probably 
a stranger to Mallow, who put forth her hand. I 
answered her in the comic phrase with which my 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 489 

old friend M'Weeney would respond to a beggar, 
whose feelings he would immediately salve with a 
sixpence : " Begor, ma'am, if I saw a copper with 
you I'd snap it ! " The old lady was staggered, but 
the hand was promptly withdrawn, and the old face 
lighted up with fun ; and from that time forth no 
petition for money ever reached me. It was one 
of the legendary tricks of Mallow electioneering to 
engage all the attorneys at a fee of ^105 apiece. 
My two conducting agents, Messrs. W. J. Fitzgerald 
and John Kepple, old schoolfellows and fast friends, 
did their work without a farthing's fee ; all others 
who had to do with the long battle on my side gave 
of their money as well as their energies without 
stint ; for even my hotel expenses I was presented 
with a blank account ; ^ and saving the sheriffs 
official expenses, which were paid out of the League 
funds, I am certain that a ;C5 note covered my whole 
personal bill of ways and means. 

The crux came when I had to find words for my 
feelings. Our platform was a dangerously narrow 
and unprotected balcony over a shop at the corner 
of the street which now bears my name. When I 
stepped out on it and looked down upon the swarm- 
ing scene of enthusiasm some fifteen feet beneath, 
my eyes swam, every word of my prepared oration 

1 Indeed, it was not alone during the Mallow Election, but during 
all the changeful twenty -three years that have elapsed since, my 
faithful old friend, Mr. John O'Mara of the Royal Hotel, could never 
be prevailed upon to accept a sixpence for the hospitalities of his 
open house. 



490 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

fled from my memory, and I was near enough to 
signalising my first public appearance by tumbling 
head foremost over the unprotected balcony. I 
was saved by the enthusiasm of the crowd. They 
did nothing but cheer and cheer, and wanted nothing 
more. And their enthusiasm so caught me that I 
forgot everything, except to stutter out a few 
untutored sentences of thanks. Then all of a 
sudden the train of reasoning of my prepared 
speech came back to me, and the whole thing went 
through with immense success in the headlong, 
shouting, wildly gesticulating way which, I am 
sorry to say, from that evening to this became my 
appalling elocutionary manner. The field was 
already fought and won. An amazed country 
learned a few days afterwards that the poor 
Attorney-General was ordered to forgo his judge- 
ship and freeze on to his seat for Mallow, in the 
hope that the local frenzy of the moment would 
have so far passed away as to make it possible for 
the Castle ass, laden with gold, to pass once more 
through the gates of Mallow. 

In the meantime, our struggle was growing amain 
against the White Terror which was set up in Dublin 
Castle to exact vengeance for the Phoenix Park 
murders. While the White Terrorists' jury-packing 
and hangings were in their heyday, a spirit arose 
among their own Praetorian Guards which struck 
dismay even into the stoical soul of Earl Spencer. 
The Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 491 

Metropolitan Police, with the faithlessness from 
which even the most trusty instruments of tyranny- 
are not free, improved the shining hour to press 
their own grievances home at the bayonet's point. 
The Land League spirit which they had so ruthlessly 
striven to put down seized upon themselves. They 
rose for higher pay, they held their indignation 
meetings in their own barracks, they bearded their 
officers, they threatened a universal strike, they 
even flourished their rifles. While the terror of the 
White Terrorists was at its height, Earl Spencer, 
addressing a band of somewhat knock-kneed special 
constables who were sworn in to take the place of 
the strikers, used these remarkable words : " The 
police were, I believe, led away by designing men. 
Some were in the force, and some were, perhaps, 
outside the force." How far some hint of what I 
am about to relate may have reached the Viceroy 
when he made his allusion to "designing men out- 
side the force," I know not. I am quite sure the 
Tadpoles who would have the affairs of nations 
conducted with the cautious nods and winks of the 
Whips' room will raise their hands in horror at my 
indiscretion in revealing, even at this distance of 
time, events so well calculated to shock the English 
imagination as to the possibilities of Irish discontent. 
This book, however, like all other books about 
Ireland, will have been written in vain if it does not 
teach the elementary truth that, while all true repre- 
sentatives of Ireland have ever honestly pined for 



492 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

some good understanding between the peoples of 
these two islands, and may ever be trusted to be 
true to their bond, they are none the less ready to go 
all lengths within the compass of honour to bring it 
home to the English mind that, failing some such good 
understanding, it is those who are most moderate 
in the desire for peace who will least hesitate to make 
Irish discontent audible, and even terrible. And at 
this particular moment reason had as little chance of 
a hearing among the jury-packers and hangmen and 
half-crazy Indian officers who had got the upper 
hand in Dublin as poor Monseigneur d'Affre had 
when he lifted up the Cross on the Paris barricade. 
The Metropolitan Police having held their mass 
meeting in disobedience to express orders from the 
Castle, two hundred and fifty of them were dismissed, 
and the rest of the Force — a thousand men of the 
finest physique in Europe — instantly threw off their 
uniforms, marched out on strike, and wired their 
colleagues of the Royal Irish Constabulary north, 
south, east, and west, that they were ready for all 
eventualities. As I sat winding up the week's 
commercial work in the office of United Ireland^ 
word reached me that a deputation from the revolted 
constables was below and desired an interview. It 
is one of the quaintest experiences of my career that, 
although I have been more fiercely engaged than 
perhaps any other man of our time in life-and-death 
struggles with the higher police officers, and in in- 
numerable physical collisions with bands of armed 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 493 

policemen themselves, I have never received a blow, 
and scarcely an unkind word, from any policeman in 
the ranks, but have, on the contrary, experienced a 
secret thrill of sympathy on their part, even in the 
midst of the wildest tumult, — of which Englishmen 
would do well to take count. The deputation came 
to inform me that the malcontents were- to hold an 
indignation meeting in the evening, and to invite 
me to address them ! I told them I would give my 
answer later, and dismissed them. 

Then and there flashed upon my brain a project 
which, doubtless, most people will hold to be an 
insane one, and which, perhaps, most others will 
hold it to be still more insane to reveal. The Irish 
people are the worst of conspirators and the most 
irresistible in the heat of a battle charge. All armed 
movements in Ireland have ever failed through being 
sicklied over with time for open-mouthedness and 
defeat in detail. Briefly, my notion was, without 
disclosing my plan to anybody (except one to be 
presently mentioned), to go to the police mass 
meeting, to raise to the highest possible pitch the 
excitement with which they were boiling over, and 
straightway, under cover of a deputation to the 
Viceroy, to march my thousand constables through 
the streets to Dublin Castle, helping ourselves to 
revolvers in the gunshops on the way, and, having 
made a separate arrangement to seize upon the 
guard at the entrance to the Upper Castle Yard the 
moment they tried to close the gate, take possession 



494 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

of the Viceroy and his Chief Secretary, convey 
them to a place of safe keeping whence they and 
we could negotiate, and in the meantime get posses- 
sion of the wires and precipitate a revolt of the 
Royal Irish Constabulary throughout the country 
to strengthen us in the negotiations. 

My one confidant in the matter was Parnell, 
against whose absolute veto there would be no 
proceeding further. He happened to be staying 
at Morrison's Hotel, and when I drove over I was 
greatly surprised to find he thought the project less 
hare-brained than I had anticipated. As he sat over 
a late breakfast, with a heap of unopened letters 
and newspapers beside him, he talked over the 
whole plan with the detachment with which he 
would examine a handful of alluvial gold from his 
own river at Avondale. The only glint of senti- 
ment was the soft whisper : " The one thing that 
can be said with certainty is that you can't come 
out alive from it — or perhaps some more of us." 
Then he got harking back upon his old theory 
that Robert Emmet showed his sense by going 
straight for the Castle. " But," he said, "they will 
have time to shut the gate." I answered that the 
utter unexpectedness of the thing would be sure to 
catch the Castle people napping, but that an essen- 
tial part of the project was to have at least fifty 
armed Fenians concealed in the neighbouring 
building of the Corporation, who would be in a 
position to make a rush for the gate, if necessary, 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 495 

at a moment's warning. He lighted a cigarette 
and listened with bent head. '* These men at the 
Castle are stupid enough for anything. Any new 
thing is sure to throw them out of gear." And he 
proceeded to discuss what might happen if we did 
succeed in rushing the Castle. As it would be by 
that time dark, the lamps would only have to be 
extinguished, and if a small number of determined 
men held the approaches to the Castle, the troops 
from the many scattered barracks would fall to firing 
at one another in the dark, and the situation would 
be, perhaps, saveable until morning, by which time 
it might be just possible for our prisoners and 
ourselves to be shipped to America. " If you 
could only win your Majuba Hill, we should prob- 
ably have the old gentleman " (Gladstone) " ready 
enough to come to business," he said; "but can 
you ? " Then, all of a sudden, he repelled the 
thoughts he had been more or less caressing. 
" You would probably carry your policemen with 
you right enough," he said; "they are mad with 
the novelty of the whole thing, and very likely with 
whiskey ; but you will never get these little secret 
gangs to budge"; and he added some contemptuous 
reflections, holding that we had got in the public 
movement all that was left of Fenianism except 
the dregs. "However," he said, "go and see for 
yourself. I will remain in town for the night." 

I was fortunate enough to secure for my inter- 
mediary with the secret societies a man of wide 



496 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

influence and determined courage, who now occupies 
a high position in the life of Dublin. By the aid of 
his pass-key I was able to see the leaders of the 
two rival sections into which the Irish Republican 
Brotherhood had got divided. I explained so much 
of the scheme as was necessary to illustrate how 
indispensable a condition of success was the assist- 
ance of from fifty to a hundred trusty armed 
Nationalists to secretly direct and protect the 
march of the police mutineers. The answer of 
one of them was: "Yes, indeed, and get my men 
hurt ! " and the answer of the second was the still 
queerer one : " You're not going to get me to give 
Parliamentary agitation an advertisement." When 
I returned to Morrison's Hotel, Parnell received 
the tidings with the gentle pooh of the lips and 
the ironic smile with which he could convey whole 
columns of comment on his reply : " I told you what 
these gentlemen were worth. I think I've got time 
to catch my train at Harcourt Street." 

The police meeting that evening was given up ; 
but the semi-insurrectionary state of Dublin for the 
next two or three days — what with the performances 
of the "special constables," half of them ridiculously 
fat Sunday citizens and the other half-tipsy rowdies, 
tearing madly through the streets, the crowds pouring 
in upon them, stoning them, sending them flying, 
and in one case going within an inch of lynching 
one of them who had run amuck with his revolver, 
and finally the wild charges of infantry and hussars 



THE MALLOW ELECTION 497 

in every direction for the extrication of the special 
constables, while the whole country was seething 
with the excitement of the Royal Irish Constabulary 
waiting for the first signal of revolt — gave pretty con- 
clusive proof that the dash upon the Castle on that 
first night of uncontrollable passion was not quite so 
hopeless an enterprise as now in cold blood it may 
appear. Even three days afterwards, when Canon 
Pope, a worthy Catholic loyalist of a rather eccen- 
tric type, addressed the revolted constables and 
besought them to surrender at discretion, his voice 
was drowned by an almost universal shout of "We 
prefer exile ! " and when, a day or two later, they 
were summoned back to the Castle, it was to be 
told to resume their uniforms on practically their 
own terms. 

The Green Street Bloody Assize was all the 
summer preparing its victims "by hook or crook" 
by means of its "loyal Protestant juries" and of 
informers subsidised by thousands of pounds apiece. 
As the autumn wore on, man after man mounted 
the scaffold protesting his innocence, and a hor- 
rible conviction overspread the country that we 
were witnessing a series of reckless, more or less 
haphazard assassinations in vengeance for the failure 
to lay hands on the murderers of Lord Frederick 
Cavendish. United Ireland could not long escape 
retaliation for the red-hot shot it poured in weekly 
upon the practitioners in the legal shambles in 

Green Street. The long-expected thunderbolt from 

2 K 



498 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the Castle fell at last, when I was summoned to the 
dock in Green Street myself to answer a charge of 
" Criminal Libel." It was in reference to an article 
headed " Accusing Spirits " in the issue of December 
23rd. It set out by a rdsum^ of the dying declara- 
tions of seven of the men hanged or under sentence 
of execution, which, with my comments, ought per- 
haps to live as the record of what "law and order" 
meant in that annde terrible in Ireland : — 

Accusing Spirits 

" Of the fact, that since his condemnation and previous to Satur- 
day last, he declared that he was innocent of the murder there is not 
the slightest doubt." — Freeman — Report of the Execution of FRANCIS 
Hynes. 

" I am going now to my doom. Going before my Maker, I have 
to declare my innocence of the murder." — Patrick Walsh, on the 
gallows, Sept. 22nd. 

" I don't deserve it. There is no claim against me. The day will 
come when, sooner or later, you shall account for my innocent life." 
— Michael Walsh, on being sentenced to death, Sept. 29th. 

*' He left it now to God and to the Virgin that he never left hand, 
or foot, or back, or anything else on that man, and he left it to the 
Court to do what they liked with him." — Patrick Higgins (Long), 
on being sentenced to death, Dec. 13th. 

" I am going before my God. I am as innocent as the child in the 
cradle." — Myles Joyce, on the gallows, Dec. J5th. 

" On my oath, I never fired a shot at John Huddy, nor Joseph 
Huddy, nor any other man since the day I was born ; yet Kerrigan 
and his family have sworn falsely." — Thomas Higgins (Tom), on 
being sentenced to death, Dec. i6th. 

" I can solemnly swear that I am as clear of that deed as any man 
who ever drew breath. This is a slaughtering-house. I am as glad 
to go to my God as to my home and family." — Michael Flynn, on 
being sentenced to death, Dec. 20th, 1882. 

Two of these men spoke from the very gallows with 
the noose round their necks. They were unquestioning 
Catholics. One moment more, and, if the protestation on 
their lips were a lie, they knew they were stepping into an 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 499 

eternity of torment. The world's opinion was to them a 
feather's weight. The rustle of the Unseen was falling 
mysteriously on their ears. Which are we to trust — the 
last words of man after man as he faces the All-Seeing 
Judge, or the verdicts of tribunals carefully concocted to 
" convict murderers by hook or crook " ? There was an 
old-fashioned maxim of the books : " Better ninety-nine 
guilty ones should escape than that one innocent man 
should suffer." The theory of the manipulators of the 
Crimes' Act seems to be that somebody must be hanged 
— the right person, if possible, but at all events some- 
body. Mistakes will occur ; but out of any given half- 
dozen victims, though there may be one or two who do 
not deserve hanging, there will almost certainly be one or 
two who do. Better, in any case, that a garrulous peasant 
should be kicked into eternity by Mr. Marwood than that 
the detective police should acknowledge itself baffled, and 
cream-faced loyalists go about in terror of their lives. It 
is impossible to study the trials and scaffold-scenes of the 
past few months without putting this horrible construction 
upon them. If Hynes or Walsh or Joyce or Higgins 
had had the fair trial by their peers which has been the 
proud right of the meanest churl in England since the 
day of Runnymede, their dying protestations need not 
have troubled the rest of the public. We desire to avoid 
exaggerated language, for we recognise the gravity of the 
subject and of our responsibility ; but our attachment to 
the elementary principles of justice impels us deliberately 
to say that, both as to the tribunal and as to the evidence, 
the proceedings against these men bear an indelible taint 
of foul play. Upon their trials the ordinary detective 
machinery — vigilance, resource, the ingenuity to discover 
scraps of evidence, the intelligence to piece them together 
— counted for little. Packed juries and bribed witnesses 
were the all-sufficient implements of justice. Anybody 
can govern with a state of siege, or win with loaded dice, 
or hang with unobstructed hanging machinery. When 



500 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

the art of trying a man consists in picking out of the 
panel twelve of his deadly enemies, and the production 
of evidence means chiefly the getting at the worst side 
of the veriest villain in the community and humbly con- 
sulting his prepossessions as to the reward and the little 
precautions necessary to make the bed of the informer a 
bed of velvet, verdicts of guilty and hangings may be had 
in any desired quantity; but if this is moral government 
in the Victorian era, why cut Strafford's head off for 
tampering with Irish juries, or strike King James's crown 
away for influencing English ones, or hold Torquemada 
accursed because he did with hot pincers what the great 
and good Earl Spencer does with bags of gold ? What 
is worst about the White Terror set up in Green Street 
is the ghastly pretence that it is all done to save the 
sacred right of trial by jury in Ireland ; that it is neces- 
sary to pack juries that we may have juries at all ; that 
it is better to convict upon paid swearing than to adopt 
drumhead ideas of evidence. Out upon the imposture ! 
If the trials of the last few months are trials by jury, such 
as Englishmen bled to maintain, we solemnly declare that 
the sooner we have the tribunal of the Three Judges, or 
the rough-and-ready justice of the court-martials, the 
better for public decency and for the accused themselves. 
An Alexandria telegram of last Friday tells us that 
" nearly five hundred prisoners have been discharged for 
want of evidence." In Alexandria they have the advan- 
tage of martial law. We wonder if these five hundred 
had been tried by packed juries of Levantine shopkeepers, 
and sums of five thousand pounds dangled before every 
needy wretch that could coin obliging evidence, how many 
of the five hundred would have escaped the rope and the 
boot of the Egyptian Mr. Marwood ? Again we say, the 
d}'ing declarations prefixed to this article may be all false ; 
but they may be also some of them or all of them true ; 
and the scandal — a scandal which would throw England 
into a blaze if the victims were Sydneys or Russells, and 



THE MALLOW ELECTION 501 

not mere Gaelic-speaking mountaineers — is that there was 
nothing in the mode of trial to satisfy the public con- 
science that murder may not have been avenged by murder. 

The police officers v^rho brought the warrant 
against me for this " false, malicious, and seditious 
libel," killed two birds with one stone by seizing the 
current issue of United Ireland — as usual, after nine- 
tenths of it had been safely disseminated through 
the country. To make the action of the Castle the 
more hateful in its dramatic insincerity, upon the 
very day on which I appeared at the Police Court, 
as the preliminary to a long term of imprisonment, 
Attorney-General Johnson hied away to Mallow, on 
his long -deferred farewell visit, and the following 
morning we read : 

The Attorney-General arrived in Mallow to-day and 
announced his election to the Bench. Mr. John Naish, 
Q.C., Law Adviser to the Castle, is the Government 
candidate for the borough. 

So the Castle had " sounded the trumpet at 
Bethsacarem " at last ! I responded the following 
morning with an address to the people of Mallow, 
which for brevity, at all events, beats the record : 

Men of Mallow — From the steps of the Judicial 
Bench the Castle Attorney-General offers you a candidate. 
From the threshold of a prison I offer you another. 
From Green Street, I appeal to Mallow. 

The prosecution at the Police Court was to 
open on Monday. I profited by the interval to 



502 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

journey down to Mallow by Saturday's night mail- 
train with Mr. Healy and Mr. Sexton. The air 
was glistening with the shower of Castle gold 
scattered by a troop of Castle attorneys ; but the 
people's golden hearts proved to be of nobler metal. 
Messrs. Healy and Sexton, then in the full blossom 
of their superb powers and of their mutual amity, 
filled the veins of the people of Mallow with liquid 
fire by their impassioned eloquence and glittering 
sarcasms ; and when we were obliged to depart by 
the night mail for the morning's prosecution in the 
Police Court, they illuminated every minute of the 
long night journey with flashes of repartee and 
brave young wit that even now, after the lapse of 
two-and-twenty years, makes the whole air bright 
around me when I recall it, as it did while I lay 
in a corner of the compartment that night smarting 
with the agony of a painful illness. Even in the 
cab from Kingsbridge, and as we parted on O'Con- 
nell Bridge in the biting air of the winter morning, 
they cut and thrust and answered back until the 
Dublin gas-lamps seemed to flash like constellations. 
Alas and alas for our poor human infirmities ! when 
shall we three so meet again ? 

We parted about six o'clock in the morning. At 
ten I was in the Police Court listening to the 
catalogue of my high crimes in objecting to 
hangings, as to five of which The MacDermot, 
subsequently Attorney-General, afterwards admitted 
to me the wrong men had been hanged. Mr. 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 503 

A. M. Sullivan, who had retired from Parliament 
and was already winning laurels at the English Bar, 
came over specially to defend me in a speech of 
noble constitutional force ; but his speech might, of 
course, have been as well delivered to a deaf mute 
as to the Police Magistrate. I was committed for 
trial in the same court at Green Street where the 
shambles had been set up, and was destined to 
experience in my own person the process of em- 
panelling a packed Protestant jury in a city five- 
sixths Catholic ; destined also, I am glad to say, to 
owe my escape from two years' imprisonment to one 
of those sound Protestant jurors who was well and 
truly packed to convict me ''by hook or crook." 
But the Mallow trial was to come off before the 
Green Street one, and all the country felt that there 
would be delivered the verdict that would really 
decide my fate and the fate of much besides. 

The Government made a supreme effort to crush 
whatever was still possible of free and advised 
speaking by prosecuting Messrs. Healy, Harrington, 
Biggar, Davitt, and others for spoken words, while 
for the printed word they were raiding United 
Ireland office and sharking up my packed jury. 
They were preparing a still more frightful blow by 
putting in the dock at last the members of the 
Invincible Conspiracy, and, by one of the foulest 
wrongs in history, affecting to confound with their 
crimes our own last stand for public liberty. While 
the Mallow election was going forward, the secret 



504 WILLIAM O'BRIEN 

story of the murderous conspiracy that had for more 
than twelve months held official Dublin in impotent 
horror was being unfolded at the Police Office by 
means of a secret instruction under the Star 
Chamber clause of the Coercion Act, with the 
consequent crop of informers. This band of twenty- 
eight men all told had baffled all previous attempts 
to penetrate the mystery of their terrible organisa- 
tion. After lying low for many months in terror of 
the public reprobation aroused by the Phoenix Park 
murders, the Invincibles soon found their own awful 
methods paralleled by the judicial crimes going on 
in Green Street. They stalked out of their lairs 
and established a counter-reign of terror as appalling 
as that under which the hangman kicked Myles 
Joyce's body through the trap-door while he was in 
his pathetic Gaelic declaring the innocence which 
nobody now doubts. The Viceroy, the Chief 
Secretary, the Judges, the chief officers of law and 
police, went about under escort in hourly peril of 
their lives. One day an Invincible was captured 
barely in time to prevent the dagger raised to strike 
at Judge Lawson in one of the principal streets of 
Dublin from doing its work. Another day, in 
another of the principal streets, one of the un- 
fortunate "loyal Protestant jurors empanelled to 
convict murderers by hook or crook " was set upon 
with knives and left bathing in his blood. The 
Castle fell into such a state of desperation that a 
battalion of Marines was actually brought over and 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 505 

in civilian clothing commissioned to walk about 
the streets with no other business than to afford 
protection against the blows of the twenty-eight 
mysterious terrorists. It was the usual action and 
reaction of police tyranny and secret terrorism 
which in any other country in the world Englishmen 
have no difficulty in understanding.^ But in Ireland 
it became the atrocious game of our official 
adversaries to blacken us with the crimes of the 
secret conspiracies they had themselves brought 
into being. Even a Chief Secretary who was 
himself one of the most lovable of human beings, 
whose writings and whose life were ennobled with 
the purest principles of public liberty, and who, 
when he came over to Ireland, repelled with indig- 
nation the attempts of the Irish landlord faction 
to fasten upon United Ireland the responsibility for 
the Phoenix Park murders, was so far changed by 
the mephitic atmosphere of Dublin Castle as to 
proclaim now that the articles in United Ireland 
were " as truly a part of the instruments of 
assassination as the dagger and the mask." 

It was against such a combination of influences, 
calumnies, and terrors that I was put on trial for 

1 On July 1 2th, 1905, the Times, commenting on the news that 
Count Schouvaloff, Prefect of Moscow, while receiving petitions, was 
fired at three times by one of the pretended petitioners and fell dead, 
contented itself with remarking : " From Moscow we hear of the 
assassination of Count Schouvaloff, who as Prefect wielded practically 
absolute power both executive and administrative. His death 
appears to arouse neither surprise nor regret. It is regarded merely 
as an example of the only reprisals that a police-ridden people can 
make upon their oppressors." 



5o6 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

my political life before the narrow tribunal of the 
Mallow electorate. To everybody outside Mallow 
it seemed a forlorn hope. The Castle candidate — 
a dull but erudite Catholic lawyer — was not, indeed, 
able to open his lips in public throughout the contest. 
Mr. Naish's silence was, however, so slight an 
advantage for us, that I once jocosely threatened I 
would get him a hearing if he continued to confine 
himself to the golden whisperings of his attorneys. 
This secrecy and these whisperings proved, how- 
ever, so effective that to the last hour the Whig and 
Tory papers were cocksure the result of the ballot 
would be a crushing surprise for us. Our one hope 
was in the unbought devotion of the men, and 
especially of the women, of Mallow. Mr. Healy, Mr. 
Sexton, Mr. Harrington, and Mr. T. P. O'Connor 
threw themselves into the fight with an enthusiasm 
scarcely less frantic than that of the people of 
Mallow themselves. Our days were days of endless 
canvassing, speech -making, and countermining of 
the Castle agents of corruption, and our nights were 
little banquets of the gods, composed, in Father 
Prout's phrase, of " Irish potatoes flavoured with 
Attic salt."' 



1 One of our allies from Cork City was an old Fenian leader of 
the name of Dominick O'Mahoney, who had escaped penal servitude 
by some miracle — possibly because even a sternly packed jury could 
not resist the influence of his sweetly dreamy temperament and 
poetical natural eloquence — but escaped only to witness the ruin of 
a flourishing business and to give way to the one weakness of his 
fine nature. One evening after our meeting Mr. T. P. O'Connor 
was rallying Dominick in his own genial way upon the comic side of 



XX THE MALLOW ELECTION 507 

Upon the morning of the polling, one hundred 
voters (being a majority of the electorate) walked 
with us, two and two, to the Court-house, under the 
eye of their wives and mothers. But the Castle 
agents winked, and bade us await what the ballot 
papers would tell us as to what our hundred stalwarts 
would really do in the secrecy of " the confessional," 
which was the popular name for the polling com- 
partment. I had not the slightest misgiving myself, 
but the excitement, the suspense and doubt, would 
go on growing until in the evening began the 
scrutiny of the votes. Not only had the hundred 
been as good as their word. The figures were : 

O'Brien . . .161 
Naish ... 89 

which was, for Mallow, a majority more stupefying 
than one of thousands would be in a modern London 
constituency. The scene in the Court-house when 
the numbers were declared was the most extraor- 
dinary scene of universal delirium I ever witnessed. 
Even a man so self- restrained in common life as 
Mr. Sexton sprang into the air like one possessed. 
I was, I think, myself the most collected, if not the 

the Fenian rising, when all of a sudden Dominick rose up in his 
offended majesty, and, with face suffused by the grand Keltic 
spiritualism which glorified his poor old clothes and even his excite- 
ment of another order, launched these withering words : " Sir, you 
are a mere member of the Saxon Parliament. I would have you to 
remember you are talking to a member of the Provisional Govern- 
ment of the Irish Republic ! " And with a pontifical wave of the 
hand he swept the mere Member of Parliament into bottomless 
insignificance. 



5o8 WILLIAM O'BRIEN chap. 

only collected person in the town that night — as in 
all moments of passion or danger I have a singular 
knack of being — but when I thought of the result 
at all, it was with a feeling of stupefaction that made 
me pine to hide myself somewhere — since I could 
not cry. My action was, however, promptly decided 
for me by a giant named Dick Lombard — still 
surviving, I rejoice to say, as one of the most 
thriving merchants of the town — who caught me in 
his arms as he might catch a baby, hoisted me on 
his enormous shoulders, and ran with me through 
the town to our committee room, as if he and every 
man, woman, and child of the crowd who were 
surging around us had gone stark mad. I stood 
before the crowd for fully half an hour before I 
could get in a word, and indeed I don't believe 
there were half-a-dozen present who heard a single 
sentence, or cared. 

It was late in the night before the old custom 
of " chairing " the successful candidate through the 
town was over. On the step of the waggonette 
where the members of Parliament sat, there clung 
on a young fellow who bore the dusky complexion 
of an Eastern mother, and had deep, almond-shaped 
eyes as oriental as a poem of Omar Khayydm, but 
rejoiced in the unoriental patronymic of M'Carthy, 
and spoke with the rich, melodious accent of Chapel 
Lane. As we were crossing the bridge we heard 
the shout, at sight of the illuminated houses and 
bonfires: "Oh, boys, the whole town is on fire!" 



THE MALLOW ELECTION 509 

McCarthy's oriental eyes lit up. " Yerra, man, they're 
illuminating up in heaven to-night," he cried. 
" Look ! " and he pointed up to where the firmament 
was all gleaming with stars. And my thoughts 
turned not upon the political results of the Mallow 
election, which had broken for ever the electoral 
power of Dublin Castle in the Irish boroughs, but 
upon a quiet corner in the graveyard yonder, and 
upon another peaceful corner in distant Glasnevin. 

These lines are written two -and -twenty years 
after, once more by the banks of the Blackwater, 
and in the midst of the survivors — sadly thinned 
and grey, alas ! — of those who participated in the 
delirium of that night. It is a reflection which fills 
me with more humble thanksgiving than any which 
the rewards of princes or empires could inspire, that, 
after all the cruel vicissitudes of a revolutionary 
war of nearly a quarter of a century — after all the 
injustices and infidelities which are the common 
fate of Man, and especially of Political Man — I find 
myself still surrounded with the same trust and love 
and clinging tenderness in my native town as on the 
first wild night when I was Member for Mallow. 

ROCKFOREST, MALLOW, 
July i/^tk, 1905. 



INDEX 



Abercorn, Duke of, 412 

" Accusing Spirits," 498-501 

Adams, "Dick," 179 {and note), 180 

Advocate, The, 106-107 

Ahadillane river, 169 

Aherlow Glen, 105 

All the Year Round, 155 

America. (6'tf^ U.S.A.) 

Amnesty question, 102, 135, 137 

" Among the Saxons," 358 

Angel Hotel, Dublin, 139 

Annakissy, 4 

Antient Concert Room, 466 

Argj'll, Duke of, 100 

Armstrong, — , 132 

Arran, Lord, 375 

Arrears Act, 424, 435, 439 

Athlumney, Lord, 375 

Aughavanagh, 200 

Avondale, 465, 467 

Babbington, Misses, 8 

Balfour, Arthur)., 68, 263, 391-392 

Balla, 231-232 

Ballintubber, 226 

Ballot Act, 143, 147 

Ballycohey, loi 

Ballydaheen, 488 

Ballydehob, 117 

Ballyhaunis, 226, 275 

Ballyknockane, 62, 63 

Ballyragget, 373 

Bantry, 124 

Barlow, Captain, 389 

Barrett, ■ — , 137 

Barry, — , 80, 81 

Barry family, 5 

Barry, John, 431 

' ' Barry the Gauger, " 5-6 

Bartley, — , Head Constable, 407 

Belcarra, 226 

Bentley and Co., Messrs., 155 

Bermingham Tower, 187 



" Big Tree, The," Mallow, 4 

Biggar, Joseph Gillis, 201. 213, 215, 

259-265, 297, 353, 356, 395, 428. 

429. 503 
Billet-Doux, The, 157, 158 
Blake, H. A., 405 
Blarney, 173, 177 [note) 
Blennerhassett, Rowland Ponsonby, 142 
Bolton, George, 121 
Boston, 158 
Bottle Hill, 64 
Bourke, Isidore, 406 
Botv Bells, 156 
" Boycott," 333 [note) 
Braddell, Major, 52 
Brady, Joe, 403 
Brand, Mr. Speaker, 297 
Brennan, Thomas, 232, 332 ; in Kil- 

mainham Jail, 365, 396, 402, 409, 

418 ; understanding with Parnell, 

465, 467 
Breslin, John, 471 
Bridge, — , 195 
Bright, John, 92, 296 
Browne, Mrs. , 66 
Buckley, Nathaniel, 188, 195, 197 
" Buckshot," 346 
Burke, Sir Bernard, 186 
Burke, T. H., murder of, 428, 432. 

[See also Phoenix Park murders. ) 
Burton, Henry, 380 
Butt, Isaac, 7, 97, 128-151, 200-201, 

211-215, 216, 241 
Byrne, Frank, 416 
Byrne, Pat, 400 

Calligy, Micky, 415, 416 

Cameron and Ferguson, 156 

Cappawhite, 105 

Captain Moonlight, 375 [note), 376 

Carbery, Miss, 453-454 

Cardiff, Dr., 388 [and note) 

Carlow College, 486 



511 



512 



WILLIAM O'BRIEN 



Carroll, Rev. Mr. , ' ' Father Carroll, " i8 1 
Casey, John Sarsfield, 190-191 
Cashel, no ; Archbishop of. (See 

Croke, Dr.) 
Castlebar, 224 
Castlerea, 232 

Catholic Chronicle. 72, 73, 74, 76 
Catholic University Education, 152, 

153-154 

Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 428, 433. 
[See also Phoeni.x Park murders.) 

Cavendish, Lady Frederick, 433-434 

Central Tenants' Association, 233 

Chamberlain, Joseph, 296, 411-412 
(and ?iote), 427, 434 

"Chapel bells," 89, 90 

Chapman and Hall, 155, 167 

Chess - playing in Kilmainham Jail, 
401 

" Christmas on the Galtees," 188-197 

City Mansion Hotel, Dublin, 122 

Clanricarde, Lord, 406 

Clare Island, 235-237 

Clarke, Dr. , 442 

"Clear, Mr.," 263-264 

Clew Bay, 225 

Clogherlynch, 226 

Clonmel, 104 

Clontarf Monster meeting, 151 

Cloyne Diocesan College, 27-30 

Codd, M. J., 387 

Coercion Acts, 292, 296, 297, 436- 
438. 439. 448-460 

Collings, Jesse, 437 

Colthurst, Col., 243 

Compensation for Disturbance Bill, 
294 

" Concentration camp," 395 

Condon, Tom, 53, 123-124 

Connellan, Owen, 162 

Cork city, inhabitants of, 176-177 ; 
Parnell, 242, 336-338, 351 

Cork Daily Herald, 79-88, 137 

Cork Weekly Herald, 72 

Cornwallis, — , 397-398 

Corrigan, Sir Dominic, 204 (and note), 
209 

Cowen, Joseph, 274, 437 

Cowper, Earl, 374 

Critchett, George, 166 

Croagh, Patrick, 225 

Croke, Dr., Archbishop of Cashel, 19- 
21, 49-50, 84, 145, 223; "Visita- 
tion " of, 276-290 ; Land Bill of 
1881, 311 -314, 340; No - Rent 
Manifesto, 371-372 ; Mallow elec- 
tion (1882), 483-487 



Crowe, — , 189-190 
Curraghkipawn, 175 

Daily Neivs, 255 ; Mr. O'Brien's letter 
to, 89-97 

Daily Telegraph, 324, 451 

Daly, Dan, 50-51 

Daly, James, 224, 231-233 j 

Daly, John, 149-151 

Danne, Mrs. , 207 

Davis, Thomas, 254 

Davitt, Michael, 116-117, 129, 217- 
220, 231-233, 268-272 ; penal servi- 
tude, 295 ; release, 416 ; No-Rent 
movement, 418-419 ; Phoenix Park 
murders, 428, 429 (note) ; nationalisa- 
tion programme, 440-447 ; National 
League, 465-473 ; prosecution of, 

503 

Dawson, Charles, Lord Mayor of 
Dublin, 317 (note) 

Deane, Mrs., 376 (note) 

Delany, Very Rev. Dr., 194-196 

Denehy, Capt. , 13, 389-390 

Devoy, John, 129, 217-220, 471-472 

Dickson, T. A., 322-324 

" Dicky Purcell," 62 

Dilke, Sir Charles, 411-412 

Dillon, John, no, 213, 233-239, 248 ; 
arrest of, 297 ; United Ireland, 303- 
315 ; retirement of, 325-329, 465, 
473 ! Gladstone, 340-342 ; Parnell's 
arrest, 353, 356 ; freedom of city 
conferred upon, 373-374. 454-456 ; 
release, 416, 426 ; Phoenix Park 
murders, 428, 429 (note) 

Dillon, John Blake, 376 (note) 

Dineen, — , 387 

Disraeli, 240-241 

Dobbyn's Hotel, Tipperary, loi 

Doloughty, — , 451-452 

Donahoe, Patrick, 157, 158 

Donnelly, Edward, 301, 302, 380, 382- 
385, 476-477 

Doran, C. G. , iio-iii 

Doris, W. , 352, 387 

Drogheda, Marchioness of, 410 

Dublin Gazette, 371, 462 

Dublin Metropolitan Police, 490-497 

Duffy, James, 72, 155 

Duggan, Dr., Bishop of Clontarf, 281 
(note) 

Duggan, Thomas, 380 

Duhallow hunt, 201-202 

Dundalk Jail, life in, 387 

Dwyer, Michael, 200 

Dynamite conspiracy, 78 



INDEX 



513 



Edward VII. , King, 94 

Egan, Patrick, 135-136, 139, 141, 271 

(note), 298-318, 356, 407, 428 
Egypt, 209-211 
Ellard, John, 134 
Emly, 279, 283 
Emmet, Robert, 397, 494 
Ennis election, 195 [note), 222 
Erris, Mayo, 373 
Evening Mail, 421, 448 

Farmer, — ,69 

" Father Danger," 21-23 

Fenian Rising in Mallow, 48-68 

■" Fenian Whig," 246 

Ferguson, John, 140 

Fethard, iii 

Finegan, Jas. Lysaght, 222 

Finn, J. W., 387 

Fitzgerald, Baron, 451 

Fitzgerald, Dr., 257 

Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 180, 198 

FitzGerald, Edward, 25-27 

FitzGerald, Jack, 56 

Fitzgerald, W. J., 489 

Flag of Ireland, 300 

Fleming, Rev. Mr. , 402-403 

Flynn, Michael, 498 

Folkestone, 384 

Forde, Patrick, 272-275, 331, 472 

Forster, W. E., 12, 248 {7iote), 2jg ; 
Irish affairs in 1881, 292-296, 318 ; 
" Buckshot," 346 (and note) ; arrest 
of Parnell and others, 350-357 ; No- 
Rent movement, 363-377 ; United 
Ireland, 378 - 385 ; kindness to 
prisoners, 388-393 ; Coercion, 404, 
409, 411-414, 416, 420, 425-427, 

430-432. 436-437 
Four Masters, 1-2 
Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 441 
Freemaris Journal, 178-202, 222-230, 

276, 297, 312-313, 324, 381, 387, 

400, 453-455 
French, Jas. Ellis, 121 
Frere, Sir Bartle, 241 

Galbraith, Professor, 187 
Gale, Constable, 76-77 
Gallacher, J. B., 182 (and note) 
Galtee estate, 188-197 
Galway, 244-245 ; Jail, 209 
General Election of 1880, 240-266 
George, Henry, 268, 269, 330, 440- 

442, 447, 456 
Gilhooly, Jas., 124 
Gill, Peter, " the General," 106-109 



Gladstone, Herbert, 261, 262, 413 

Gladstone, W. E. (see also Land Acts, 
1870, 188 1 ), General Election of 
1880, 241-266 ; Land Bill of 1881, 
319-320; Parnell, 338-344, 350- 
362 ; Dillon, 340-342 ; Home Rule, 
424, 425 ; Kilmainham Treaty, 
420, 434-43S ; Phceni.x Park mur- 
ders, 431, 434-435 ; referred to, 67, 
89 (note), 92, 95, 124, 130, 147 
(note), 152, 252, 261-262, 273, 392, 
411 

Glasgow, 383 

Goddard, Norris, 409-410 

Goschen, G. J. , 434 

Grattan, Henry, 186, 398 

Gray, Edmund Dwyer, 178, 182-185, 
191, 222-224, 237-238, 299, 302- 

303. 454-455 
Gray, Sir John, lor, 102, 318 (and 

note) 
Green Street Court, Dublin, 497-498 
Greer, Rev. Mr., 236 
Griffith's Valuation, 269 
Guinee, W. B. , 181 (and note), 182 

Haltigan, John, 380 

Hamilton, Capt. , 452 

Hannen, Sir Jas. , 264 

Harcourt, Sir Wm. , 271, 444 

Hardwicke Small-Pox Hospital, 207 

Harp, The, Montreal, 168 

Harrington, Tim, 198, 457-458, 475, 
503. 506 

Harris, Matt, 122, 457, 468 (note) 

Hartington, Marquis of, 249, 411, 434 

Hay, Sir John, 248 

Healy, Maurice, 421-422 

Healy, T. M. , in House of Commons, 
249-253, 256 ; Land Bill of 1881, 
309-311 ; letter in United Ireland, 
358 ; in America, 356, 410 (a7td 
note) ; Coercion Bill, 435-436, 437- 
438 ; United Ireland, 474 - 477 ; 
Mallow election of 1882, 502, 503, 
506 ; referred to, 184, 323, 337, 

344. 431 
Herlihy, Tom, 44-45, 47 
Heron, Serjeant, 104, 123 
Hibernian Bank, 359 
Higgins, Patrick and Thos. , 498 
History of the Insurrection of 1798, 173 

(note) 
Hogan's Hotel, Tipperary, 104 
Holt, Clarence, 154 
Home Rule, 94, 95-96, 130, 139-142, 

152; Bill of 1886, 138, 292; League 

2 L 



514 



WILLIAM O'BRIEN 



Council, 222 ; League of Great 

Britain, 212 ; Gladstone and, 424, 

425 
Hood's Hotel, Dublin, 137 
Hooper, Alderman, 188, 208-209 
Hospice for the Dying at Harold's 

Cross, 389-391 
Houghton, Lord, 196 
Hubon, J. M. , 387 
Huddy, John and Joseph, 498 
Hunt, Wm. , 380 
Hydrate of chloral, 172-175 
Hynes, Francis, case of, 451-455, 498 

Imperial Black Preceptory of Orange- 
men, 187 

Imperial Hotel, Dublin, 230, 353, 
356, 452-454, 476, 477, 478 

Imprimerie Schiller, Paris, 383 

Industrial Resources of Ireland, 162 

Inishark, 234 

Inishbofin, 234 

Insomnia and drugs, 172-175 

Invincibles' Conspiracy, 195 {note\, 290, 
374. 414. 416, 430, 432, 503-505 

Irishman, The, 73. (See United 
Ireland. ) 

Irish National Land League. [^See 
Land League. ) 

" Irish Rebel's View of the Irish Situa- 
tion," 89-97 

Irish Republican Brotherhood, 122- 
123, 134, 163 {note), 218, 471, 496 

Irishtown, 223 

Irish World, TA^, 272-275, 332, 440,472 

Jacmel, The, 103 
James, Sir Henry, 122 
Johnson, P. F. , of Kanturk, 137 
Johnson, Attorney-General, 479, 501 
Joyce, Myles, 498, 504 

Kane, Sir Robert, 162 

Kavanagh, Rev. P. F. , 173 [note) 

Kelly, — , 146 

Kelly, John, 198 

Kelly, Tim, 403 

Kenmare, Lord, 142, 143 

Kennedy, Canon, 403 

Kenny, Dr. J E. , 353, 354, 365, 381, 

388, 394, 396 
Keogh, Judge, 98 
Kepple, John, 489 
Kerrigan, — , 498 
Kerry election, 142-143 
Kettle, A. J., 243, 365 
Kickam, Chas. , 168 



Kilkenny election, 257, 258 

Killala, 225 

Killaloe, 133-134 

Killen, J. Bryce, 231, 379, 380 

Kilmainham Jail, 12, 349-362, 363- 

365. 385-403 
Kilmainham Party and Parliamentary 

Party, 303, 306, 313, 320-336, 342 
Kilmainham Treaty, 408, 409, 415, 

417-420. 424, 425-426, 429, 430, 

432, 438, 439, 459, 462 
Kilsheelan ; or The Old Place and the 

New People, 165-168 
King, Hugh, 471 
King-Harman, Col., 147, 211 
Kinkora, 134 
Knockarowra Mountain, 43-44 

Labouchere, Henry, 437 

Ladies' Land League, 281 [note), 376- 

377. 382, 385, 393, 413, 462-464 
Lalor, Fintan, 347-348 
Land Act of 1870, 99-100, 188, 286- 

288 
Land Act of 1881, 291-317, 319-350, 

421, 424, 450 
Land Bill of 1882, 422-424 
Land Bill of 1903, 319 
Land Commission, 321, 405, 413, 420 
Land Conference of 1903, 214, 422- 

424, 443 (note) 
Land Corporation, 449-455, 461 
" Land for the People, The," 268-269 
Land League, 90, 135-137, 194, 216- 

221, 229-230, 233, 267-290, 291- 

318, 325-329, 368-377 
Land Nationalists and Parliamentary 

Party, 440-447. 466-473 
Land Purchase, 269, 421, 422 
Land Purchase Act, 338, 367 (note), 

442, 467-468 (note) 
Land question, 129, 188, 214 
Lane, Denny, 143 
Lansdovvne, Lord, 100 
Larkin, O'Neill, 332 
Lawson, Judge, 455, 477, 504 
Layard, Sir Henry, 241 
Leamy, Edmund, 253-254 
Leconfield, Lord, 375 
Lee, the, 174 
Leeds, Gladstone's speech at, 339-342, 

344 
Lefroy, — , 181 
Limerick, 102, 133, 146-151 
Literary Club, 118-121 
Litton, — , 322 
Liverpool, 383, 442-443 



INDEX 



515 



Lloyd, Clifford, 375 {note), 405 

Lombard, Dick, 308 

Longford, 145 

"Long John," 53 

Longmans, Messrs., 156 

Lord Harry, The, 208-209 

Lords' Committee, 421 

Loughrea, 315 

Louisburgh, 225 

Lowther, James, 223 {and note), ^30 

Lucan, Lord, 225, 229 

Lynam, Jas. , 414 {note) 

Lynch, Sir Robert Blosse, 229 

M'Cabe, Archbishop, 280 {note), 339, 

376, 450 
MacCartan, Father, 323 
M'Carthy, Father Justin, 24 
M'Carthy, Justin, 254-259, 416, 474 
M'Carthy, — , 508-509 
M'Coan, — , 246 {note) 
M'Dermot, Archie, 76, 81 
M'Dermot, The, 455, 502 
M'Donnell, Wm., 380 
M'Gee, Canon, 224, 226 
M'Grath, Th., 387 
MacHale, Archbishop, of Tuam, 275 
Mackey, Capt. , 74-78, 138 
Macleod, — , 55 
Macmillan s Magazine, 406 
M'Morrow, J., 387 
Macroom, 173 
M 'Sweeney, D. , 387 
MacWeeney, Theophilus, 179, 186- 

188, 204, 298, 489 
Maguire, Constantine, 471 
Maguire, John C. , 471 
Maguire, John Francis, loi 
Mahon, O 'Gorman, The, 131 
Mallon, Chief, 348 
Mallow, Mr. O'Brien a native of, i ; 

election of 1880, 242 ; of 1882, 18, 

66, 479-490, 501-509 
Mallow Defiance (O'Connell's), 347 
Manchester 383, 441-442 
Mangan, Alderman, 387 
Mansfield family, 8 
Marlborough, Duchess of, 230, 234 

{ayid note) 
Martin, John, of Longford, 145, 147 

{note) 
Martin, John, of Loughorne, 113-114 
Maryborough, 336 
Mary Eustace, Sister, 390-391 
Massereene, Lord, 375 
Mayo Movement, 222-230, 242, 275- 

276 



Meath, 242 

Midlothian Campaign, 320 

Milltown, 223 

Mitchel, John, 49, 109-114, 129, 182 

Molesworih Street Hall, Dublin, 212 

Monaghan, 325 

Montenolte, Cork, 161 {note) 

Mooney's, Dublin, 318 

Moonlighters, 375, 376, 410 

Moore, George Henry, 101, 108-109 

Moriarty, Abb6, 21 

Morley, John, 296, 392, 421, 437 

Morphy, — , 453, 454 

Morris, Chief-Justice, 451 

Morrison's Hotel, Dublin, 345, 348, 

457. 494 
MuUany, John, 72 
Mullet, — , 387 
Mullingar Jail, 475 

Naas, Lord, 181 {note) 

Nagle, Alderman D. A., 79, 160-161 

{note) 
Nagle, James, 5-6 

Nagle, Kate. (5fir O'Brien, Mrs. James) 
Nagle, Nano, 4 

Naish, John, 479, 501, 506-507 
Nally, — , 401 
Nation, The, 56, 72, 73, 146 {note), 

254 
National Convention, 329-336 
Nationalisation and Peasant Proprie- 
tary, 440-447, 466-473 
National League, formation of, and 

Conference, 461-462, 463, 465-478 
National University, 214 
'Neath Silver Mask, 154-158 
New Ross, 253 
Newry, 113, 114 
New York Herald, 238-240, 242, 246, 

418, 446, 447 
Nolan, John, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141 
"Nominal Home Rulers," 310 
No- Rent Movement {see also Kilmain- 

ham Treaty), 354-355. 362-377. 

404-414, 417-418, 420, 439-440, 

448 
Nulty, Dr., Bishop of Meath, 281 

{note), 442 
Nunn, Brother, 187 

O'Brien, James F. X., 67, 97-99 
O'Brien, James, 2-4, 55, 69-71, 86, 

488 
O'Brien, James Nagle, 11, 87, 117, 

48-66, 168-169, 203-205, 488 
O'Brien, Alderman John, 177 {note) 



5i6 



WILLIAM OBRIEN 



O'Brien, Mrs. James («i^«Kate Nagle), 
4-5, 9-IO, 12-13, 55-57, 170, 233, 
298, 360-361, 363-364, 388-390; 
death of, 414-415, 488 

O'Brieo, Maggie, 169-171, 203-207, 
488 

O'Brien, Peter, 295 (nofe) 

O'Brien, Richard, 169-170, 203-206, 
488 

O'Brien, William, early life, 14-47 ; 
journalistic work, 71-88 ; first public 
speech, iio-iii ; love of books and 
letters, 153-154 ; illness, 159, 165- 
166 ; insomnia and drugs, 172-175 ; 
scholarship won by, 159-161 ; post 
on Freeman' s Journal, 178-202 ; 
visit to Egypt, 209-211 ; mission to 
the west for Freeman's, 222-230 ; 
imprisonment, 356 - 362 ; United 
Ireland [see that title) ; Kilmainham 
prison, 385-403 ; release, 414-415 ; 
Mallow election, 479-490 ; scheme 
re police strike, 493-497 

O'Brien, Justice Wm., 195 [note), 222 

O'Brien, Wm. Smith, 254 

Obstruction, 259-260 

O'Callagan's Mills, 146 

O'Connell, Daniel, 9, 10, 56, 129, 
132, 141, 151, 347, 420, 426 

O'Connor, Arthur, 356 

O'Connor, Jas. , 379, 380 

O'Connor. Master, 15-19, 25 

O'Connor, T. P., 244-245, 255, 298, 
323. 356. 410 [and note), 469, 473, 
506 

O'Donnell, Frank Hugh, 247 (and 
note) 

O'Donovan, Edward, 379 

O'Donovan, Wm., 379, 380 

O'Donovan Rossa, 103-105, 123 

O'Dowd, — , 387 

O'Dwyer, Dr., 281 [note) 

O'Hagan, Justice, 75, 77-78, 132, 
321 

O'Keefe, Arthur, 379, 380 

O'Keefe, Florence, 380 

O' Kelly, Jas. J., 245-246 {and note), 
298. 353. 355. 365. 396. 397. 409. 
416, 426 

O'Leary, Dr., 233 

O'Mahoney, Dominick, 506 [note) 

O'Mara, John, 489 (note) 

O'Reilly, John Boyle, 157-158 

O'Shea, Captain, 184, 411, 441 

O'Shea, Henry, 134, 147 (note) 

O'Sullivan, W. H., 145-146 

O'Toole, 387 



Pall Mall Gazette, 324, 421, 437 

Palmer, Sir Roger, 229 

" Papist Rats," 222-223 

Parliamentary agitation, 128-151 

Parnell, Miss Anna, 376 (nofe), 463 

Parnell, Chas. Stewart, tour in America, 
238-240 ; General Election of 1880, 
241 - 266 ; manifesto, 257 ; Irish 
bishops, 282 ; Land Act of 1881, 
296-317, 319-329 ; National Con- 
vention, 329-336 ; United Ireland, 
297-318 ; Gladstone, 338-344 ; im- 
prisonment, 348-352, 362, 365-367, 
393-403; release, 415-416 ; No-Rent 
movement, 362, 365-374, 408-412, 
419-420 ; freedom of city conferred 
upon, 373, 374, 455-456 ; Phoenix 
Park murders, 428-435 ; Coercion 
Act, 439, 444, 448, 456-464 ; Mr, 
Davitt, 444-446 ; Mr. Dillon, 465- 
466 ; National League, 465-470 ; 
Mallow election of 1882, 479-482, 
484 ; police strike, 494-496 ; char- 
acteristics, 395-404 ; referred to, 95, 
121, 122, 129-131, 137, 144, 177 
(note), 183, 184, 197-202, 212, 213, 
215-223, 230, 232-234, 257, 259, 
265-266 ; Kilmainham Treaty and 
Land Bill of 1882. (See those 
titles. ) 

Parnell, Miss Fanny, 332 

Parnell, Sir John, 200 

Parnell Commission, 90 

" Parnellism and Crime," 264 

Peasant Proprietary v. Nationalisa- 
tion, 440-447 

Peel, Sir Robert, 10, 151 

Persico, Monsignor, 283 (note) 

" Pether the Packer," 295 (note) 

Philadelphia, 411 (note) 

Phillips, Wendell, 239 (note) 

Phoenix Park murders, 406, 416, 417, 
425, 427-438, 504-505 

Pigott, Richard, 72 (and note), 73, 297- 
302, 342, 406-407 

Pilot, T/i€, Boston, 157, 161, 166, 
167 

Plunkett, Capt., 405 

Poor-Law elections, 413 

Pope, Canon, 497 

Portland Prison, 271 

Power, Mick, 198 

Power, O'Connor, 139, 141, 215-216, 
247 

Prison fare, 393-395 

Prince of Wales, the, 261 

Property Defence Association, 410 



INDEX 



517 



Quaid, Father, 146 

gueen's College, Cork, 153-154, 159- 

164 
Queenstown, 141, 160 (nofe) 
Quinlan's Castle, 288-290 
Quirin, J. P., 352> 

" Rakes, The," 6-7 

Redmond, John E., 253, 352 

Redmond, W., 249 

Redpath, James, 333 (and note) 

Reilly, Matthew, 380 

Relief Funds, 234-240 

Rice, Canon, 141 

Robinson, — , 232 

Roche, Augustine, 161 (note) 

Rock of Cashel, 279 

Romano's Restaurant, Strand, 308 

Ronayne, " Honest Joe," 143-145, 147, 

160 (note), 197 
Rooney, John, 471 
Roscommon election, 246 
Roscrea, no 

Rotunda, The, Dublin, 139-140, 353 
Routledge, Messrs., 155 
Royal Hotel, Mallow, 489 
Royal Irish Constabulary, 490-497 
Ryan, — , 189-190, 191 
Ryan, Father Ned, 485 
Ryan, Father, 204, 207 
Rylett, Rev. Harold, 322 

St. Colman's College, Fermoy, 48-50, 

486 
St. Michan's, Dublin, 187 
St. Paul's Magazine, 156 
Sandhurst, Lady, 68 
Schouvaloff, Count, 505 [note) 
Searle, — , 349 
Secret conspiracy, 11 5-1 28 
Secret Service Fund, 300 
*' Senate Wing," 304 
Sexton, Thomas, 251-253, 323, 352, 

473. 502, 506, 507 
Shaw, W., 297, 310-31 1 (a?id note) 
Shaw-Lefevre, 411 
Sheares, Brothers, 187 
Sheehy, David, 123 
Sheehy, Father, 297, 336, 428 
Sheridan, P. J., 353 
Sheridan, Sergeant, 121 
Sirr, Major, 180 
Slieve-na-mon Mountain, 108 (and 

note) 
SHgo Jail, 231 
Sligo, Lord, 225, 229 
Smith, " Billy," 405 



Smith, Elder, and Co., 155, 165, 166- 

167 
Smith, W. H., 421 
Smyth, Lewis, 331 
Southern Cross, Buenos Ayres, 168 
Southern Ribbon Lodge, 375 (note) 
Spencer, Earl, 301-302, 428, 434, 450, 

490, 491 
Standard, The, 324 
"Stephens' Wing," 303 
Storey, — , 437 
Stranorlar, 213 

Sullivan, A. M. , 145, 147, 503 
Sullivan, Mrs. A. M., 376 (note) 
Sullivan, John, 53 
Sullivan, Serjeant, 55 
Sullivan, T. D., 254, 353, 354-355 
Summers, — , 196 
Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, 

296 
Swift, Dean, 186 
Synott, — , 387 

Tanner, Dr., 162, 263 

"Test Cases," 337, 342, 35o, 352- 

353. 369 
Thurles, 108, 276 
Thurles Seminary, 485 
Times, The, 258, 286, 324, 342, 406- 

407. 505 («^^«) 
Tipperary, 290; elections, 103-114 
Tipperary Land League, 352 
Tone, Wolfe, 218 
Traill, Capt. , 405 
Tralee, 198 

Trevelyan, George Otto, 448-450 
Tubbercurry, 407 
TuUa, 413, 414 (note) 
Tullamore, 68, 413-414 (and note) 
Twenty Years' Purchase, 269 
Tyrone election, 322-325 

United Ireland, establishment of, 
297-318 ; Mr. O'Brien's work on, 
357-360 ; during imprisonment, 378- 
385 ; Phoenix Park murders, 429, 
433 ; Dillon's retirement, 465-466 ; 
difficulties in connection with, 473- 
478 ; prosecution of, 497-506 ; re- 
ferred to, and quoted, 407, 421, 
422, 424, 426-427, 429, 444, 459- 
460 
United Irish League, 306, 469 (note) 
United States, Parnell's visit to, 233, 
240, 396-397 ; Davitt's visit to, 444- 
447 ; National League, 471-472 



5i8 



WILLIAM O'BRIEN 



Ventry, Lord, 375 

"Visitation" of Archbishop Croke, 
276-290 

Wallace, Dr. Russel, 442 
Wallace, W. B., 471 
Walsh, Andrew, 471 
Walsh, Father, 196 
Walsh, Michael, 498 



Walsh, Patrick, 498 
Warren, G. P., 72 
Washington, George, 396-397 
Westport, 223, 225, 234, 443 
Wexford, 199, 343, 345, 375 
When we were Boys, 208 {and note) 
Whiteside, — , 132 
White Terror, The, 490 
Wright, J, Wilson, 27, 30 



THE END 



H l04 89 J 












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